SAA-C03 Introduction
How IAM is used to securely manage access
Managing user identities with long term credentials in IAM
Managing access using IAM user groups & roles
Using IAM policies to define and manage permissions
Cross-account access
AWS Web Application Firewall
AWS Firewall Manager
AWS Shield
AWS Security Hub Overview
Other AWS Security Services
Amazon Cognito
Identity Federation
AWS SSO
SAA-C03 Review
The course is part of this learning path
This course looks at the key Security services within AWS relevant to the Solution Architect associate exam. Core to security is Identity & Access Management, commonly referred to as IAM. This service manages identities and their permissions that are able to access your AWS resources and so understanding how this service works and what you can do with it will help you to maintain a secure AWS environment. IAM is an important service in ensuring your resources are secure.
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Learning Objectives
- Learn about identity and access management on AWS including users, groups & roles, IAM policies, MFA, identity federation, and cross-account access
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) including what it is, when to use it, how it works, and why use it
- Understand how to configure and monitor AWS WAF
- Learn about AWS Firewall Manager and its components
- Learn how to configure AWS Shield
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Cognito
Now that we know a little bit more about User pools, let’s quickly examine how the authentication flow is handled by your application and the service.
Your user will be presented with a login screen or terminal of some sort from within your application. They will submit their credentials, either from having created an account directly or by logging into a third-party provider.
The application will call the InitiateAuth operation with those credentials. This API call kicks off the authentication flow. It directly indicates to amazon Cognito that you want to authenticate.
If the call is successful - Cognito will respond either with a token or with a challenge.
A challenge can include CAPTCHAs or Dynamic challenge questions. These are normally used to help screen for bots. You can insert your own custom challenges if you wish. This will be sent back to the client and it now becomes Their problem.
When the client is ready to respond back to the server(cognito), they can reply with RespondToAuthChallenge and provide whatever information the challenge requires back. If the user fails the challenge, you can have Cognito set up to resend a new one. This can include multiple rounds until the user is successful or fails out.
If successful Cognito will shoot back some tokens for the client to use - Hurray authentication!
For a deeper dive into the process please take a look over here.
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 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 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.