Data protection and encryption

The AWS shared responsibility model applies to data protection in AWS Transfer Family (Transfer Family). As described in this model, AWS is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the AWS Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. This content includes the security configuration and management tasks for the AWS services that you use. For more information about data privacy, see the Data privacy FAQ. For information about data protection in Europe, see the AWS shared responsibility model and GDPR blog post on the AWS Security Blog.

For data protection purposes, we recommend that you protect AWS account credentials and set up individual user accounts with AWS IAM Identity Center. That way each user is given only the permissions necessary to fulfill their job duties. We also recommend that you secure your data in the following ways:

We strongly recommend that you never put sensitive identifying information, such as your customers' account numbers, into free-form fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with Transfer Family or other AWS services using the console, API, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs. Any configuration data that you enter into Transfer Family service configuration, or other services' configurations, might get picked up for inclusion in diagnostic logs. When you provide a URL to an external server, don't include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

In contrast, data from upload and download operations into and out of Transfer Family servers is treated as completely private and never exists outside of encrypted channels—such as an SFTP or FTPS connection. This data is only ever accessible to authorized persons.

Data encryption

AWS Transfer Family uses the default encryption options you set for your Amazon S3 bucket to encrypt your data. When you enable encryption on a bucket, all objects are encrypted when they are stored in the bucket. The objects are encrypted by using server-side encryption with either Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3) or AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) managed keys (SSE-KMS). For information about server-side encryption, see Protecting data using server-side encryption in the Amazon Simple Storage Service User Guide.

The following steps show you how to encrypt data in AWS Transfer Family.

The following example shows an IAM policy that grants the minimum permissions required when using AWS Transfer Family with an Amazon S3 bucket that is enabled for AWS KMS encryption. Include this example policy in both the user IAM role policy and session policy, if you are using one.

{
   "Sid": "Stmt1544140969635",
   "Action": [
      "kms:Decrypt",
      "kms:Encrypt",
      "kms:GenerateDataKey",
      "kms:GetPublicKey",
      "kms:ListKeyPolicies",
   ],
   "Effect": "Allow",
   "Resource": "arn:aws:kms:region:account-id:key/kms-key-id"
}