AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional — Question 84

A consulting company was hired to assess security vulnerabilities within a client company's application and propose a plan to remediate all identified issues. The architecture is identified as follows: Amazon S3 storage for content, an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer with attached Amazon EBS storage, and an Amazon RDS MySQL database. There are also several AWS Lambda functions that communicate directly with the RDS database using connection string statements in the code.

The consultants identified the top security threat as follows: the application is not meeting its requirement to have encryption at rest.

What solution will address this issue with the LEAST operational overhead and will provide monitoring for potential future violations?

Answer options

• A. Enable SSE encryption on the S3 buckets and RDS database. Enable OS-based encryption of data on EBS volumes. Configure Amazon Inspector agents on EC2 instances to report on insecure encryption ciphers. Set up AWS Config rules to periodically check for non-encrypted S3 objects.
• B. Configure the application to encrypt each file prior to storing on Amazon S3. Enable OS-based encryption of data on EBS volumes. Encrypt data on write to RDS. Run cron jobs on each instance to check for unencrypted data and notify via Amazon SNS. Use S3 Events to call an AWS Lambda function and verify if the file is encrypted.
• C. Enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the load balancer, ensure that AWS Lambda is using SSL to communicate to the RDS database, and enable S3encryption. Configure the application to force SSL for incoming connections and configure RDS to only grant access if the session is encrypted. Configure Amazon Inspector agents on EC2 instances to report on insecure encryption ciphers.
• D. Enable SSE encryption on the S3 buckets, EBS volumes, and the RDS database. Store RDS credentials in EC2 Parameter Store. Enable a policy on the S3 bucket to deny unencrypted puts. Set up AWS Config rules to periodically check for non-encrypted S3 objects and EBS volumes, and to ensure that RDS storage is encrypted.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Option D is the correct choice because it ensures encryption at rest for all components, including S3, EBS, and RDS, while also implementing monitoring through AWS Config rules. The other options either do not provide comprehensive encryption or require more operational effort, such as modifying application code or running cron jobs, which makes them less suitable for addressing the issue with minimal overhead.