4.1.2. Encryption in Transit (TLS/SSL, ACM)
First Principle: Data encryption in transit protects information moving between systems by encrypting network traffic, preventing eavesdropping and tampering, ensuring secure communication channels and data confidentiality/integrity.
Encryption in transit (or in-flight encryption) safeguards data as it travels across networks, such as between clients and AWS services, or between different AWS services within the cloud. This prevents unauthorized parties from intercepting or modifying data while it is being transmitted.
Key Concepts and Services for Data Encryption in Transit:
- TLS (Transport Layer Security) / SSL (Secure Sockets Layer):
- What it is: Cryptographic protocols that provide communications security over a computer network. Widely used for secure web browsing (HTTPS).
- Mechanism: Encrypts data before it's sent and decrypts it upon receipt, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity during transmission.
- AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): A service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates.
- Purpose: Simplifies the use of TLS/SSL certificates with integrated AWS services (e.g., Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway).
- Benefits: Automates certificate provisioning, renewal, and deployment.
- Integration with AWS Services: Many AWS services automatically encrypt traffic in transit by default or offer easy options to enable TLS/SSL.
- ELB: Can terminate TLS connections from clients and encrypt traffic to backend instances.
- CloudFront: Uses TLS for communication between users and Edge Locations.
- VPC Endpoints (Interface): Enable private and encrypted communication within your VPC to AWS services, bypassing the public internet.
Scenario: You need to ensure all web traffic to your application, hosted on EC2 instances behind an ALB, is encrypted using HTTPS. You also need to secure the communication between your EC2 instances and an Amazon S3 bucket which happens privately within your VPC.
Reflection Question: How does implementing data encryption in transit using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) (for SSL/TLS certificates) with an ELB and leveraging VPC Interface Endpoints fundamentally protect sensitive information from unauthorized access during network communication?