AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 304

A company is using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to run its container-based application on AWS. The company needs to ensure that the container images contain no severe vulnerabilities. The company also must ensure that only specific IAM roles and specific AWS accounts can access the container images.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST management overhead?

Answer options

• A. Pull images from the public container registry. Publish the images to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) repositories with scan on push configured in a centralized AWS account. Use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy the images to different AWS accounts. Use identity-based policies to restrict access to which IAM principals can access the images.
• B. Pull images from the public container registry. Publish the images to a private container registry that is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances in a centralized AWS account. Deploy host-based container scanning tools to EC2 instances that run Amazon ECS. Restrict access to the container images by using basic authentication over HTTPS.
• C. Pull images from the public container registry. Publish the images to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) repositories with scan on push configured in a centralized AWS account. Use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy the images to different AWS accounts. Use repository policies and identity-based policies to restrict access to which IAM principals and accounts can access the images.
• D. Pull images from the public container registry. Publish the images to AWS CodeArtifact repositories in a centralized AWS account. Use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy the images to different AWS accounts. Use repository policies and identity-based policies to restrict access to which IAM principals and accounts can access the images.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) provides a fully managed solution with native 'scan on push' capabilities to identify vulnerabilities with minimal overhead, unlike AWS CodeArtifact which is designed for software package management. To successfully restrict access across different AWS accounts and specific IAM roles, both ECR repository policies (resource-based) and identity-based policies are required. Option C satisfies all security and cross-account requirements with the lowest operational complexity.