How to Secure Your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

The cost and other benefits offered by cloud computing have led to its increased adoption by both organizations and individuals. However, these organizations need to look at the security risks associated with the adoption of cloud computing and look for ways to deal with such concerns. Amazon Web Services or AWS has tried to alleviate enterprise security and compliance concerns associated with cloud computing by introducing several features and functions that make the whole process safer. Internet hosts including EC2 instances are highly vulnerable to security lapses, intrusion attacks, port scanning and other attacks. This AWS EC2 tutorial aims to discuss the security issue, and guides you about how does the EC2 make cloud computing safer for the users.

Security Features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

The EC2 offers several free security features like advanced firewall, critical data privacy and custom/secure permissions. Amazon Web Services also offers additional security features such as data encryption, intrusion detection, persistency and snapshot backup for extra charges. The company also offers load balancing, file hosting service and root access for a charge. Despite all these  features, organizations or developers using virtual machines instances available within Amazon’s EC2 need to take additional precautions to secure them. Try Newvem’s extended security features, or learn more.

Although the EC2 firewall is a powerful tool for securing your instance from unwanted and undesirable network traffic, it needs to be used correctly. Let’s look at some of the ways to mitigate the security risks arising from use of bad passwords on your system, scanning of your ports and inundating your servers with junk requests. Such attacks could disrupt your work and applications often leading to loss of data or its misuse.

• Close all unnecessary ports and restrict the access to your ports to a set of trustworthy hosts or networks. This will make it impossible for anyone or another network to even connect to your server. The EC2 has a authorize command which instructs the firewall to drop packets that are sourced from a network not approved by it. One can even restrict the access to your ports to just one host.
• Avoid using passwords and use the ssh keys instead. One can use the EC2-add-keypair command to generate an RSA key which allows you to log in as root on a new instance. In cases when users create additional users for their instances and secure their accounts with passwords, there are chances of intrusion. A safer method is to use ssh keys for all users.
• Ensure that your system is accessible to only those users who need to have the access. The extent of access and privilege should be on the basis of the tasks to be performed by each person. In addition have a procedure to revoke access when it is no longer needed.
• Always stay current with your operating systems. Since EC2 provides a set of base Amazon Machine Images or AMIs that have been created some time in the past, every user should integrate the latest changes when initiating a new AMI.
• Always subscribe to security mailing lists which provide early warnings for latest exploits and vulnerabilities.
• Another option is to use tools that help in identifying unauthorized changes to vital files in your environment and thus be a crucial indicator of intrusion.
• Never rely on the possibility of data recovery by AWS support as the sole back up strategy. Instead, create backups of your working instance configurations by bundling a custom AMI after any modifications. Amazon EC2 backup become easy in case of a EBS backed root device. In such cases, simply re starting the instance allows you to recover the data.

Although these measures are not fool proof methods, they will certainly enhance the security level of your virtual instances and prevent unwanted costs associated with the unofficial or unauthorized usage of your instances.

Contact us today to learn how we can offer you the best in secure clouds with the Amazon AWS EC2.

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