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Exploring AWS Config

awssecurity aws_config, audit

In my previos blog post I talked about creating an IAM admin user and using that instead of root user all the time. Applying such best practices is a good idea which also begs the question: How can I enforce these rules?

AWS Config

The official description of the service is: “AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources”

What this means is you select some pre-defined rules or implement your custom rules and AWS config constantly runs checks against your resources and notify you if you have non-compliant resources.

Since currently I’m interested in hardening IAM users in the next example I’m going to use an IAM check

Use case: Enforcing MFA

As of this writing there are 80 managed config rules. To enforce MFA, I simply searched MFA in the “Add rule” anf got 5 matches of which I selected only 3:

After I accepted the default settings it was able to identify my IAM user without MFA:

And it comes with a nice little dashboard that shows all your non-compliant resources:

It also supports notifications via SNS. It creates a topic and all you have to do is subscribe to that via an email address and after confirming your address you can start receiving emails.

I was only expecting to get emails about non-compliant resources but it’s bit noisy as it sends emails with subjects “Configuration History Delivery Completed” or “Configuration Snapshot Delivery Started” which didn’t mean much to me.

Pricing

I think the price is exteremely high. The details can be found on their pricing page but in a nutshell a single rule costs $2/month. So for the above example I paid $6 which is a lot of money in terms of resources used.

Conclusion

I like the idea of having an auditing system with notifications but for this price I don’t think I will use it.

I will keep on exploring though as I’m keen on implementing my custom rules with AWS config and also implementing them without AWS config and see if this service adds any benefit over having scheduled Lambda functions.

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