An SSH Key Request

Corey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it’s nobody in particular’s job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They’ve also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That’s S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.

Corey: So, most interesting this week is probably my request for AWS to support a different breed of SSH key. No, it’s not a joke. Listen on and we’ll get there.

So, from the security community last week, everyone talks about how to secure AWS environments. This post takes a different direction and talks about how to secure GitHub organizations, which makes sense if you think about it as an area to focus on. If you compromise an org’s GitHub repositories, it’s basically game over for that company.

I also came across this post from 2020, talking about how if asked politely, CloudTrail would spew other accounts’ credentials your way. How many more exploits like this have we seen and just never been told about?

NCC Group has some great stories up about compromising CI/CD pipelines, and they are all spot on. Because nobody really thinks about the Jenkins box that has everyone working with it, outsized permissions, and of course, no oversight.

Enterprise cloud risk is a very real thing, so a post from Josh Stella, who’s the CEO of Fwage—though he pronounces it as ‘Fugue’—and it makes some excellent points, and also cites me, so of course, I’m going to mention it here. We incentivize the behaviors we want to see more of. There’s a security lesson in there somewhere.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends atNew Relic. If you’re like most environments, you probably have an incredibly complicated architecture, which means that monitoring it is going to take a dozen different tools. And then we get into the advanced stuff. We all have been there and know that pain, or will learn it shortly, and New Relic wants to change that. They’ve designed everything you need in one platform with pricing that’s simple and straightforward, and that means no more counting hosts. You also can get one user and a hundred gigabytes a month, totally free. To learn more, visitnewrelic.com. Observability made simple.

Now, from AWS, what have they said? “Amazon EC2 customers can now use ED25519 keys for authentication with EC2 Instance Connect”. I really wish they’d add support for ECDSA keys as well, and no, this is not me making a joke. Those are the only key types Apple lets you store in the Secure Enclave on Macs that support it, and as a result, you can use that while never exporting the private key. I try very hard to avoid having private key material resident on disk, and that would make it one step easier.

“Integrating AWS Security Hub, IBM Netcool, and ServiceNow, to Secure Large Client Deployments”. I keep talking about how if it’s not simple, it’s very hard to secure. AWS, IBM, and ServiceNow, all integrating is about as far from “Simple” as is possible to get.

“Best practices for cross-Region aggregation of security findings”. And this was a post that I was about to snark that it should be as simple as “Click the button,” but then I read my post, and to my surprise and yes, delight, it already is. Good work.

And in the land of tool, I found a post talking about how to assume AWS IAM Roles using SAML.to in GitHub Actions, and I really wish that that was first-party, but I’ll take what I can get. Because again, I despise the idea of permanent IAM credentials just hanging out in GitHub or on disk or, realistically, anywhere. I like these ephemeral approaches. You can be a lot more dynamic with it and breaching those credentials doesn’t generally result in disaster for everyone. And that’s what happened last week in AWS security.

Corey: Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition with the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—and be sure to sign up for the Last Week in AWS newsletter at lastweekinaws.com.

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