How to handle Sensitive Data in Amazon EC2

Prasad
3 min readAug 29, 2024

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Masking sensitive data in EC2 involves leveraging AWS’s secure storage, encryption services, and best practices for access control, logging, and instance management. By combining AWS tools like Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, IAM roles, KMS, and CloudTrail, along with best practices for securing shell scripts and configurations, you can significantly reduce the risk of exposing sensitive information in your EC2 environment.

Here is some of my realtime learning of handling the secrets

  1. Systems Manager

Amazon EC2 integrates well with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and AWS Secrets Manager, which provide secure and centralized storage for sensitive information like passwords, API keys, and database credentials.

• AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: You can store plaintext or encrypted parameters, which can be accessed securely from your EC2 instances without hardcoding sensitive information in your scripts or applications.

aws ssm get-parameter – name “my-db-password” – with-decryption – query “Parameter.Value” – output text

• AWS Secrets Manager: This service provides a more robust and feature-rich approach, enabling automated rotation of secrets and secure access management.

aws secretsmanager get-secret-value – secret-id my-database-secret – query ‘SecretString’ – output text

Using these services ensures that sensitive data is never stored in plain text on your EC2 instance.

2. Instance Metadata and IAM Roles

Avoid hardcoding AWS credentials in EC2 instances. Instead, use IAM roles assigned to your EC2 instances to provide temporary and automatically rotated credentials. The instance metadata service can then be used to retrieve temporary credentials without exposing any secrets:

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/YourInstanceRoleName

Ensure that you control access to the instance metadata service to prevent potential exploitation.

3.Encrypt Sensitive Data

Ensure sensitive data is always encrypted, both at rest and in transit:

• Data at Rest: Use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to manage encryption keys for sensitive data stored in Amazon EBS volumes, S3 buckets, or RDS databases. For example, enable encryption on an EBS volume using a KMS key:

aws ec2 create-volume – size 100 – region us-west-2 – availability-zone us-west-2a – volume-type gp2 – encrypted – kms-key-id alias/my-key

• Data in Transit: Ensure all communications between your applications and EC2 instances use secure protocols (e.g., HTTPS, SSH, TLS). This prevents sensitive data from being exposed during transmission.

4. Use EC2 Instance User Data Securely

Be cautious when using user data to bootstrap an EC2 instance because it is accessible from the instance metadata service. Ensure that user data scripts do not contain sensitive information, or consider encrypting them.

5. Harden Your EC2 Instances

• Disable Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) Version 1: Use IMDSv2, which provides session-based authentication and is more secure than the previous version.

aws ec2 modify-instance-metadata-options – instance-id i-1234567890abcdef0 – http-tokens required – http-endpoint enabled

• Regularly Patch and Update Software: Keep the operating system and all software up to date to protect against known vulnerabilities.

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Prasad
Prasad

Written by Prasad

I am a OpenSource Enthusiast|Python Lover who attempts to find simple explanations for questions and share them with others

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