How to Achieve CIS Compliance for AWS IAM
How to Achieve CIS Compliance for AWS IAM
CIS compliance is crucial for establishing strong security controls and safeguarding your cloud infrastructure against cyber threats. Pulumi can help you identify existing cloud resources that are not in compliance, and it can also enforce compliance policies proactively before infrastructure is deployed. Get started with Pulumi to use these compliance tools or speak with a Solutions Architect to get an expert consultation.
What is CIS Compliance?
CIS (Center for Internet Security) Compliance refers to the adherence to security best practices outlined by the CIS, a nonprofit organization that develops globally recognized security standards. These best practices are known as CIS Controls and CIS Benchmarks, which provide guidelines for securing various technologies and systems, including operating systems, cloud services, network devices, and software.
Key Aspects of CIS Compliance
- Implementation of Controls: Start by implementing the CIS Controls relevant to your organization's size and risk profile.
- Use CIS Benchmarks: Configure your systems and applications according to CIS Benchmarks.
- Regular Audits: Continuously monitor and audit your systems to ensure ongoing compliance with CIS recommendations.
- Automation Tools: Consider using CIS-CAT (CIS Configuration Assessment Tool) or other automation tools to assess and enforce compliance across your infrastructure.
Benefits of CIS Compliance
- Standardized Security: Ensures that your organization follows industry-recognized security best practices.
- Risk Reduction: Helps in reducing the attack surface by implementing critical security controls.
- Compliance with Other Standards: CIS Controls and Benchmarks often overlap with other compliance frameworks like PCI-DSS, NIST, and ISO, making it easier to achieve multiple compliance goals simultaneously.
- Improved Incident Response: By implementing CIS Controls, organizations are better equipped to detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents.
Pulumi Insights
Use Pulumi Insights to gain visibility into your cloud infrastructure's configuration to assess CIS compliance. Pulumi Insights is Intelligent Cloud Management. It helps you gain security, compliance, and cost insights into the entirety of your organization's cloud assets and automatically remediate issues.
Pulumi Copilot
Use Pulumi Copilot to assist configuring your infrastructure to make it compliance ready. You can tap into the Pulumi Copilot's deep understanding of your organization's context to gain visibility into the configuration of resources and assess their compliance.
Compliance Ready Policies
With comprehensive coverage of AWS, Pulumi Compliance Ready Policies provide an enhanced level of control and governance over your cloud resources. Pulumi Compliance Ready Policies empower you to enforce best practices, security standards, cost controls, and compliance requirements seamlessly within your infrastructure-as-code workflows.
What is IAM Roles and Policies?
AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a service that enables you to securely manage access to AWS resources. It allows you to create and control user permissions, defining who can access specific resources and under what conditions. IAM helps ensure security and compliance by enforcing fine-grained access controls across your AWS environment.
What controls can I put in place to evaluate IAM Roles and Policies resources?
- IAM policies should not allow full "*" administrative privileges
- IAM users should not have IAM policies attached
- IAM users' access keys should be rotated every 90 days or less
- IAM root user access key should not exist
- MFA should be enabled for all IAM users that have a console password
- Hardware MFA should be enabled for the root user
- Password policies for IAM users should have strong configurations
- Unused IAM user credentials should be removed
- MFA should be enabled for the root user
- Password policies for IAM users should have strong AWS Configurations
- Ensure IAM password policy requires at least one uppercase letter
- Ensure IAM password policy requires at least one lowercase letter
- Ensure IAM password policy requires at least one symbol
- Ensure IAM password policy requires at least one number
- Ensure IAM password policy requires minimum password length of 14 or greater
- Ensure IAM password policy prevents password reuse
- Ensure IAM password policy expires passwords within 90 days or less
- Ensure a support role has been created to manage incidents with AWS Support
- MFA should be enabled for all IAM users
- IAM customer managed policies that you create should not allow wildcard actions for services
- IAM user credentials unused for 45 days should be removed
- IAM Access Analyzer analyzers should be tagged
- IAM roles should be tagged
- IAM users should be tagged
- Expired SSL/TLS certificates managed in IAM should be removed
- IAM identities should not have the AWSCloudShellFullAccess policy attached
- IAM Access Analyzer external access analyzer should be enabled
Speak to a Solutions Architect to implement policy as code to manage IAM resources for CIS compliance.
Talk to a Solutions Architect
Get in touch with our Solutions Architects to get all your resources in use with Pulumi Insights
