AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 249

A company is building an application on AWS that will store sensitive information. The company has a support team with access to the IT infrastructure, including databases. The company's security engineer must introduce measures to protect the sensitive data against any data breach while minimizing management overhead. The credentials must be regularly rotated.
What should the security engineer recommend?

Answer options

• A. Enable Amazon RDS encryption to encrypt the database and snapshots. Enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) encryption on Amazon EC2 instances. Include the database credential in the EC2 user data field. Use an AWS Lambda function to rotate database credentials. Set up TLS for the connection to the database.
• B. Install a database on an Amazon EC2 instance. Enable third-party disk encryption to encrypt Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. Store the database credentials in AWS CloudHSM with automatic rotation. Set up TLS for the connection to the database.
• C. Enable Amazon RDS encryption to encrypt the database and snapshots. Enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) encryption on Amazon EC2 instances. Store the database credentials in AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation. Set up TLS for the connection to the RDS hosted database.
• D. Set up an AWS CloudHSM cluster with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to store KMS keys. Set up Amazon RDS encryption using AWS KSM to encrypt the database. Store the database credentials in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store with automatic rotation. Set up TLS for the connection to the RDS hosted database.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C because it uses AWS Secrets Manager for storing database credentials with automatic rotation, which simplifies management while ensuring security. Option A incorrectly suggests including credentials in EC2 user data, which is not secure. Option B uses an EC2 instance and third-party encryption, adding unnecessary complexity. Option D involves AWS CloudHSM and KMS, which may be more complex than needed for the scenario.