2.1.3.2. Data Encryption in Transit: ACM and TLS

💡 First Principle: Data encryption in transit protects information moving between systems, 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.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) (formerly SSL) is the cryptographic protocol widely used for securing communication over networks, particularly for HTTPS on the web.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates for use with AWS services and your internal connected resources. ACM handles certificate provisioning, renewal, and deployment to integrated services like Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, and API Gateway.

Key Services for Encryption in Transit:

• "TLS/SSL": The cryptographic protocol for secure network communication.
• "AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)": Manages SSL/TLS certificates for AWS integrations.
• "ELB", "CloudFront", "API Gateway": Services that can terminate TLS connections, encrypting traffic.

Scenario: An organization configures an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an SSL/TLS certificate provisioned by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to encrypt all incoming traffic before forwarding it to backend web servers.

Visual: Data Encryption in Transit with ACM and TLS

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⚠️ Common Pitfall: Terminating SSL at the load balancer (ALB) but then sending unencrypted HTTP traffic to backend instances. For highly sensitive data, end-to-end encryption (re-encrypting traffic between ALB and instances) is a best practice.

Key Trade-Offs:

• End-to-End Encryption vs. Complexity/Performance: While optimal for security, implementing end-to-end encryption can add configuration complexity and a minor performance overhead compared to SSL termination at the ALB.

Reflection Question: How does encrypting data in transit using TLS/SSL with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) fundamentally mitigate common network security threats like man-in-the-middle attacks and ensure data confidentiality during communication?