Amazon Web Services Updated SAA-C03 Exam Questions and Answers by inayah

Option Aallows importing your own encryption keys into AWS KMS, ensuring control over key material.

Option Duses S3 Glacier with SSE-C, where the customer controls the encryption keys, meeting compliance needs.

Option Buses AWS-managed key material, violating the requirement for key material control.

Option C and Eare not fully compliant with the control requirement.

AWS Secrets Manager is designed specifically to securely store and manage sensitive information such as database credentials. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Lambda and RDS, and it provides automatic credential rotation with minimal operational overhead.

AWS Secrets Manager: By storing the database credentials in Secrets Manager, you ensure that the credentials are securely stored, encrypted, and managed. Secrets Manager provides a built-in mechanism to automatically rotate credentials at regular intervals (e.g., every 30 days), which helps in maintaining security best practices without requiring additional manual intervention.

Lambda Integration: The Lambda function can be easily configured to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager using the AWS SDK, ensuring that the credentials are accessed securely at runtime.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Parameter Store with Rotation): While Parameter Store can store parameters securely, Secrets Manager is more tailored for secrets management and automatic rotation, offering more features and less operational overhead.

Option C (Encrypted Lambda environment variable): Storing credentials directly in Lambda environment variables, even when encrypted, requires custom code to manage rotation, which increases operational complexity.

Option D (KMS with automatic rotation): KMS is for managing encryption keys, not for storing and rotating secrets like database credentials. This option would require more custom implementation to manage credentials securely.

AWS References:

AWS Secrets Manager- Detailed documentation on how to store, manage, and rotate secrets using AWS Secrets Manager.

Using Secrets Manager with AWS Lambda- Guidance on integrating Secrets Manager with Lambda for secure credential management.

Amazon Neptune: Neptune is a fully managed graph database service that is optimized for storing and querying highly connected data. It supports both property graph and RDF graph models, making it suitable for applications that need to analyze relationships between data entities.

Neptune Streams: Neptune Streams captures changes to the graph and streams these changes to other AWS services. This is useful for applications that need to monitor and respond to changes in real-time, such as providing recommendations based on user interactions and relationships.

Least Operational Overhead: Using Neptune Streams directly with Amazon Neptune ensures that the solution is tightly integrated, reducing the need for additional components and minimizing operational overhead. This integration simplifies the architecture by eliminating the need for a separate service like Kinesis for change processing.

To securely integrate Amazon S3 with an application that uses Amazon Cognito for user authentication, the following two steps are essential:

Step 1: Create an Amazon Cognito Identity Pool (Option A)

Amazon Cognito Identity Poolsallow users to obtain temporary AWS credentials to access AWS resources, such as Amazon S3, after successfully authenticating with the Cognito user pool. The identity pool bridges the gap between user authentication and AWS service access by generating temporary credentials using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Once a user logs in using theCognito User Pool, the identity pool providesIAM roles with specific permissionsthat the application can use to access S3 securely. This ensures that each user has appropriate access controls while accessing the S3 bucket.

This is a secure way to ensure that users only have temporary and least-privilege access to the S3 bucket for their documents.

Step 2: Create an Amazon S3 VPC Endpoint (Option C)

By creating anAmazon S3 VPC endpoint, the company ensures that communication between the application (which is hosted in a private subnet) and the S3 bucket occurs over theAWS private network, without the need to traverse the internet. This enhances security and prevents exposure of data to public networks.

TheVPC endpointallows the application to access the S3 bucket privately and securely within the VPC. It also ensures that traffic stays within the AWS network, reducing attack surface and improving overall security.

Why the Other Options Are Incorrect:

Option B: This is incorrect becauseAmazon Cognito User Poolsare used for user authentication, not for generating S3 access tokens. To provide S3 access, you need to useAmazon Cognito Identity Pools, which offer AWS credentials.

Option D: ANAT gatewayis unnecessary in this scenario. Using aVPC endpointfor S3 access provides a more secure and cost-effective solution by keeping traffic within AWS.

Option E: Attaching a policy to restrict access based on IP addresses is not scalable or efficient. It would require managing users’ dynamic IP addresses, which is not an effective security measure for this use case.

AWS References:

Amazon Cognito Identity Pools

Amazon VPC Endpoints for S3