Cloud Academy Sketches: Encryption in S3

For cloud teams in charge of security, understanding the configurations and options available for securing data in the cloud can help them make them make the right choices. In this short video sketch, our AWS Security expert Stuart Scott will take a closer look at encryption in S3. Read on.

Some of 2017’s largest data breaches involved unprotected Amazon Simple Storage (S3) buckets that left millions of customer data records exposed to the public. The problem wasn’t the technology, but administrators who improperly configured the security settings.

For cloud teams in charge of security, understanding the configurations and options available for securing data in the cloud can help them make them make the right choices.

In this short video sketch, our AWS Security expert Stuart Scott will take a closer look at encryption in S3.

Amazon S3 provides a number of encryption mechanisms to secure and protect your data when at rest, giving you the flexibility to select the most appropriate way of managing your keys.

These include:

Server-Side encryption with S3 managed keys (SSE-S3)
Server-Side encryption with KMS Managed keys (SSE-KMS)
Server-Side encryption with customer-managed keys (SSE-C)
Client-Side encryption with customer-managed keys (CSE-C)
Client-Side encryption with KMS Managed keys (CSE-KMS)

SSE-KMS uses the AWS Key Management Service (KMS), which gives users the ability to generate, control, and store encryption keys allowing you to encrypt your data.

Let’s take a look at how S3 works with KMS to perform both the encryption and decryption of your objects when using SSE-KMS.

Tags: AWSS3

6 years ago

Stuart Scott

Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation. To date, Stuart has created 100+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 120,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance. Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS. He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape. In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community. Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.