CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark: What You Should Know!

As security and compliance demands rapidly evolve, organizations face constant threats from ransomware, malware, and emerging cyber threats. Protecting sensitive data is crucial for maintaining trust and meeting industry regulations. The CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, created by the Center for Internet Security (CIS), provides prescriptive best practices for securing AWS configurations, detecting deviations, and enhancing your security posture.

In this blog, we’ll explore who should adopt this framework, its different levels, key sections, and the benefits of compliance.

CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark Framework

The CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark is a compliance standard for securing Amazon Web Services resources. The Benchmark provides prescriptive instructions for configuring AWS services by industry best practices and to meet the security and compliance objectives for AWS. CIS AWS Benchmark guidelines help organizations configure their systems securely, close vulnerabilities, and reduce the risk of cyber threats. The best practice recommendations cover protocols for driver installation, user profile management, and remote access restrictions.

The CIS provides three benchmark levels to help secure an AWS environment. These include:

CIS AWS Benchmark – This offers a starting point for setting up the AWS cloud securely at the account level. Some of these resources are identity and access management, logging, monitoring, and networking.

CIS Product-Level Benchmarks – Offer recommendations for setting up products and services, including those in the compute, database, storage, and containers sectors. These benchmarks enable customers to select and configure the optimal cloud service for their specific requirements and environment. They further secure the cloud services utilized within cloud accounts.

CIS Standalone Cloud-Services Benchmarks – They are explicitly designed for AWS services that need more detailed setup advice. In this instance, the services component of the Product-Level Benchmark refers to the standalone CIS AWS Benchmark for the particular service.

What are the Sections Within the AWS Foundations Benchmark?

Here are the different sections of this regulatory standard:

Identity and Access Management

Recommendations for identification, accounts, authentication, and authorization are included in this section. Most identity and access control issues on AWS are controlled using the IAM service. Most recommendations in the CIS AWS Benchmark cover IAM configurations, such as setting up a password policy, employing security groups and roles, and configuring devices for multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Storage

The suggestions in this area are updates and improvements to AWS’s storage features that help improve security. The major topics of this section are Amazon EC2, S3, and RDS. Access control to resources, handling sensitive data, and encryption for data in transit and at rest are all covered in the CIS AWS Benchmark storage recommendations.

Logging

AWS offers several logging, monitoring, and auditing services with corresponding CIS AWS Benchmark recommendations:

AWS CloudTrail—used to monitor API usage and user activities;
AWS Config—used to record and assess resource configurations;
VPC Flow Logs—used to record details about network traffic in VPCs; and,
AWS KMS—used to manage the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt your data.

The CIS AWS Benchmark does not directly address some AWS logging features.

Numerous AWS services are connected with Amazon CloudWatch Logs, the primary log ingestion and query service. The Benchmark recommends connecting CloudTrail and CloudWatch Logs.

Monitoring

The advice in this section focuses on using the CloudTrail service in conjunction with CloudWatch Logs filter metrics to track specific API requests. Each suggestion in the CIS AWS Benchmark creates a unique filter with a corresponding alarm.

Two criteria, which are described in the logging section, determine the monitoring recommendations:

Users must make sure that CloudTrail is activated in every region; and,
Users must integrate CloudWatch Logs Networking with CloudTrail.

Networking

The suggestions in this area are moderate, even though networking is essential to the security of any distributed system. The CIS AWS Benchmark recommendations restrict traffic from a zero network (0.0.0.0/0) and limit routing for VPC peering connections based on the principle of least privilege.

Under each CIS Foundations Benchmark recommendation are the subsections mentioned below:

Profile applicability: determines if the suggestion relates to Level 1 (the normal security profile) or Level 2 (higher security profile);
Description: describes the recommendations significance;
Audit: explains how to assess the standing of the recommendation in its current state.
Remediation: outlines a step-by-step process for carrying out recommendations successfully;
References: links to supplementary documentation;
Additional information: helps in analysing and fixing the problem; and,
CIS controls: allows reference mapping to certain CIS controls.

Benefits of the CIS AWS Benchmark Security Framework

Here are some advantages of being compliant with these security guidelines:

Widely acknowledged industry best practices: Security professionals have a clear set of standards and prescriptive recommendations for particular assets in their AWS account, thanks to the CIS AWS Benchmark. Implementing essential security measures is simplified for security teams and AWS account holders through established best practices. It is incorporated into the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) National Checklist Program, cited and acknowledged by PCI 3.1, and complies with FedRAMP (NCP).

Simple integration into the security ecosystem: Over 20 security manufacturers’ products can incorporate the CIS AWS Benchmark. Organizations can utilize these tools to incorporate AWS security best practices into their current security and audit processes.

Regular auditing enables security and compliance teams to monitor the security of an AWS account. Implementing CIS AWS Benchmark best practices can simplify risk management and clarify how to audit the usage of AWS for regulated and mission-critical business systems, infrastructure, and applications.

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