This is very updated version of the blog post: http://blog.it-security.ca/2016/11/secure-your-aws-account-using.html
As I mention before:
The very first thing you need to do while building your AWS infrastructure is to enable and configure all AWS account level security features such as: CloudTrail, CloudConfig, CloudWatch, IAM, etc.
Time flies when you're having fun and flies even faster in the infosec world. My templates become outdated and now I'm presenting an updated version of the AWS security automation with following new features:
- integrated with Terraform (use terraform templates in the folder tf)
- creates prerequisites for Splunk integration (User, key, SNS, and SQS)
- configures cross-account access (for multiaccount organizations, adding ITOrganizationAccountAccessRole with MFA enforced)
- implements Section 3 (Monitoring) of the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations benchmark.
- configures CloudTrail according to the new best practices (KMS encryption, validation etc)
- configures basic set of the CloudConfig rules to monitor best practices
First, my security framework now consists of two main parts: cf (CloudFormation) and tf (Terraform) with Terraform template as a bootstrapper of the whole deployment.
You can use Terraform, you can use CloudFormation, but why both ?
Terraform is very quickly evolves, has cross-cloud support and implements some missing in CloudFormation features (like account level password policy configuration, etc); CloudFormation is native for AWS, well supported, and, most important, AWS provides a lot of best practices and solutions in the form of the CloudFormation templates.
Using both (tf and cf) gives me (and you) ability to reuse solutions, suggested and provided by AWS, without rewriting the code, have flexibility and power of terraform and one single interface for whole cloud automation.
No more bucket pre-creation or specific sequence of the CloudFormation deployment - just
terraform apply. It will take care of all CloudFormation prerequisites, version control and template updates.
But, if you wish, at current state you can use only my CloudFormation templates - cf still does all heavy lifting.
The main trick of the Terraform - CloudFormation integration was to tell terrafrom when CloudFormation template is updated to ensure that terraform will trigger cf stack update.
I achieved this using S3 bucket with version control enabled and always updating (just setting template version)
security.global.yaml.
This code takes care of Terraform and CloudFormation integration:
# creating Security cloudforation stack
resource "aws_cloudformation_stack" "Security" {
name = "Security"
depends_on = ["aws_s3_bucket_object.iam_global", "aws_s3_bucket_object.cloudtrailalarms_global", "aws_s3_bucket_object.awsconfig_global", "aws_s3_bucket_object.cloudtrail_global", "aws_s3_bucket_object.security_global"]
parameters {
AccountNickname = "${var.enviroment_name}",
CompanyName = "${var.company_name}",
MasterAccount = "${var.master_account}"
}
template_url = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/${aws_s3_bucket.CFbucket.bucket}/${var.security_global}?versionId=${aws_s3_bucket_object.security_global.version_id}"
capabilities = [ "CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM" ]
tags { "owner" = "infosec"}
}
And finally deployment steps are:
- Get code from my git repo: https://github.com/IhorKravchuk/it-security
- Switch to tf folder and update terraform.tfvars specifying: your AWS profile name (configured for aws cli using aws configure --profile profile_name); name for the environment (prod, test, dev ..) ; company(or division) name; region and AWS master account ID.
- terraform init to get aws provider downloaded by terraform
- terraform plan
- terraform apply
