Thursday, November 2, 2017

Refining the existing AWS Security Groups

I am a big fan of blogs/articles which use multiple services from AWS. Each of the services from AWS is powerful, but when we combine them in different ways we can achieve a lot more.

When an organization deploys an application in the Cloud, over time there can be some port numbers in the Security Groups which are not required for the functionality of the application. These unnecessary ports might be a security risk to the organization. So, it's always better to open the minimum set of port numbers required.


AWS doesn't give a direct way to identify the unused ports, the VPC flow logs have to be captured and analyzed to identify the unused port numbers and the corresponding Network Interfaces and Security Groups. So, below are two blogs from AWS on the same.

How to Optimize and Visualize Your Security Groups

How to Visualize and Refine Your Network’s Security by Adding Security Group IDs to Your VPC Flow Logs

The end results are the same for the two blogs, but they do use different services from AWS. The blogs are pretty straightforward to follow. After trying it out, you would be familiar with VPC flow logs, Lambda, Kinesis, Elasticsearch and IAM.

For those who are getting started with AWS, I would definitely recommend going through the above blogs in the same order. Depending on the technology comfort, it might take time, but the blogs are worth trying it out.