AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 101

A company has a few dozen application servers in private subnets behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) in an AWS Auto Scaling group. The application is accessed from the web over HTTPS. The data must always be encrypted in transit. The Security Engineer is worried about potential key exposure due to vulnerabilities in the application software.
Which approach will meet these requirements while protecting the external certificate during a breach?

Answer options

• A. Use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to pass through traffic on port 443 from the internet to port 443 on the instances.
• B. Purchase an external certificate, and upload it to the AWS Certificate Manager (for use with the ELB) and to the instances. Have the ELB decrypt traffic, and route and re-encrypt with the same certificate.
• C. Generate an internal self-signed certificate and apply it to the instances. Use AWS Certificate Manager to generate a new external certificate for the ELB. Have the ELB decrypt traffic, and route and re-encrypt with the internal certificate.
• D. Upload a new external certificate to the load balancer. Have the ELB decrypt the traffic and forward it on port 80 to the instances.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Option C is correct because using an internal self-signed certificate protects the external certificate by limiting its exposure, while still ensuring that data is encrypted in transit. Option A does not provide encryption beyond the NLB, and options B and D expose the external certificate to potential breaches, compromising the security requirements.