Skip to main content

Tejas Jain - AWS Notes #1

AWS Organizational Hierarchy AWS Organizations "must" be the starting point of your AWS deployment. (unless you are absolutely sure that it won't scale.. highly unlikely!!)



An AWS Organization comprises of multiple "Organizational Units (OUs)". OUs comprise of other OUs or member "AWS Accounts". 



Image credits : Here

Tip : Design the OUs such that they complement with your organizational hierarchy and businesses and sub-divisions.

For eg. 
Company XYZ maps to an AWS Organization, 
   -- Finance maps an OU, 
      --  Investment Banking within Finance maps to a sub-OU
            -- Investment Banking Prod environment maps to an AWS Account
            -- Investment Banking Non-Prod environment gets another AWS Account
            -- Investment Banking Dev environment gets another AWS Account
      --  Fixed Income within Finance maps to another sub-OU
      --  Retail within Finance maps to another sub-OU
        and so on...
 
OUs inside another OU are termed as "nested OUs"


Image credits : Here

Breaking down AWS Organizations further:

1. Organization : 
    An entity that consolidates multiple AWS Accounts, and used to administer the accounts as a single unit.
    An Organization has one management account along with zero or more member accounts.

2. Root:
    Parent container
    Applying a policy to the root, applies the policy to all the OUs and accounts in the Organization
    You can have only one root

3. Organizational Unit:
    Container for AWS accounts or other OUs
    A policy attached to an OU is applied to all the member accounts / sub-OUs under it
    One parent only per OU
   
4. AWS Account
    It contains AWS resources and identities that can access these resources

5. Service Control Policy (SCP)
      It is a document that describes controls to be attached to the              entire organization, OU or individual AWS accounts
      It contains policies that define the services and action that users or a role can perform
      Policies are inherited and assigned at different points in the hierarchy
        Similar to IAM permission policies except that they don't grant permissions.
        Two strategies for SCPs
            1. Allow list strategy -- By default, access is allowed
            2. Deny list strategy

Management Account
1. Create accounts in the organization (Greenfield deployments)
2. Invite other existing accounts to the organization (think mergers & acquisitions)
3. Remove accounts from the organization (Divestitures -- company selling one of its business units)
4. Manage Invitations 
    The process of asking another account to join your organization
    This can be done only via the "management account"
    Invitation is provided to an Account ID or email address
    The invited account, after accepting invitation becomes a "member account"
    


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MITRE ATT&CK - Kerberos Vulnerabilities and Security

From the previous post, the summary of Kerberos authentication process is as below: For the initial authentication, the user’s client machine sends a request to the KDC  Authentication Service (AS) . The request includes details like the user’s username, and the date and time. All information except the username is encrypted using the hash of the user’s password. The KDC AS uses the username to look up its copy of the user’s password hash and uses it to decrypt the rest of the request. If the decryption is successful, that means the client used the correct password hash and the user has successfully authenticated. Once the user is authenticated, the KDC AS sends the user’s client a  ticket granting ticket   (TGT) . The TGT includes a unique session key and a timestamp that specifies how long that session is valid (normally 8 or 10 hours). Importantly, before sending the TGT, the KDC encrypts it using the password hash for a special account, the  KRBTGT account. ...
7 comments
Read more

Checkpoint - Exporting Objects in CSV format

Be it a Network Operations Manager, Security Architect or a Security Auditor, the people up the hierarchy always harangue the Security Engineers to compile the list of firewall objects or rules or policies or the traffic statistics and so on.. This can turn out to be quite hectic especially if there are no built in features to systematically provide the output in a "layman-readable" format. Come, Checkpoint's "Object Explorer..."  which not only provides the output in the "layman-readable" format, but also provides in-built filtering mechanisms, thereby ensuring that the Security Engineer doesn't have to rely on Google for building his scarce Microsoft Excel data filtering skills. The following screenshots will show how easy it is, with Checkpoint R80.10 to generate the firewall configuration inventory. On the SmartConsole Unified Portal, navigate to Menu >> Open Object Explorer... Select the Categories you wish to see in your output: Click o...
Post a Comment
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK - Tools, Attacks and Related - 1

MASSCAN - Mass IP port scanner https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan TeamTNT - Threat group that has primarily targeted cloud and containerized applications. The group has been active since at least Oct 2019 and has mainly focused its efforts on leveraging cloud and container resources to deploy cryptocurrency miners in victim environments. List of Techniques used by TeamTNT can be found here: https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0139/ Mimikatz - Is a credential dumper capable of obtaining plaintext Windows account logins and passwords, along with many other features that make it useful for testing the security of networks. Golden Ticket Attack - A golden ticket in Active Directory grants the bearer unlimited access. A golden ticket attack abuses the Kerberos protocol, which depends on the use of shared secrets to encrypt and sign messages. One of these secrets is known only to the Key Distribution Center (KDC): the password hash for the KRBTGT user, which is used to issue the Ke...
2 comments
Read more