AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 453
A company has an application on Amazon EC2 instances that store confidential customer data. The company must restrict access to customer data. A security engineer requires secure access to the instances that host the application. According to company policy, users must not open any inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys for the EC2 instances.
The security engineer wants to monitor, store, and access all session activity logs. The logs must be encrypted.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
Answer options
- A. Use AWS Control Tower to connect to the EC2 instances. Configure Amazon CloudWatch logging for the sessions. Select the upload session logs option and allow only encrypted CloudWatch Logs log groups.
- B. Use AWS Security Hub to connect to the EC2 instances. Configure Amazon CloudWatch logging for the sessions. Select the upload session logs option and allow only encrypted CloudWatch Logs log groups.
- C. Use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to connect to the EC2 instances. Configure Amazon CloudWatch monitoring to record the sessions. Select the store session logs option for the desired CloudWatch Logs log groups.
- D. Use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to connect to the EC2 instances. Configure Amazon CloudWatch logging. Select the upload session logs option and allow only encrypted CloudWatch Logs log groups.
Correct answer: D
Explanation
AWS Systems Manager Session Manager allows secure, auditable instance management without requiring inbound ports, bastion hosts, or key management. It natively supports sending session logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, where you can specifically choose the 'upload session logs' option and restrict it to encrypted log groups to satisfy the encryption requirement. AWS Control Tower and AWS Security Hub do not provide interactive session connection capabilities, making options A and B incorrect.