Amazon Web Services Updated SCS-C03 Exam Questions and Answers by charlie

AWS CloudFormation supports dynamic references to AWS Secrets Manager, which allow sensitive values to be retrieved securely at stack runtime. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidance, dynamic references prevent secrets from being stored in plaintext in templates, stack metadata, or logs.

Using dynamic references ensures that secrets remain encrypted at rest and are accessed only when required. CloudFormation does not support SecureString parameters for Secrets Manager references, and encrypting templates does not prevent exposure during execution.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS CloudFormation Dynamic References

AWS Secrets Manager Best Practices

AWS IAM supports identity federation by allowing external identity providers that use OpenID Connect (OIDC) to authenticate and assume IAM roles. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, IAM OIDC identity providers are the recommended approach for enabling third-party systems, such as external CI/CD pipelines or Git-based repositories, to securely obtain temporary AWS credentials without using long-term access keys.

By creating an OIDC identity provider in IAM and configuring the IAM role trust policy to trust the external IdP, the company enables secure, token-based authentication. The trust policy can include conditions that restrict which repositories, branches, or workflows are allowed to assume the role, enforcing least privilege. AWS Security Specialty guidance emphasizes that this method eliminates static credentials and relies on short-lived tokens issued by the OIDC provider.

Option B is incorrect because IAM Roles Anywhere is designed for workloads running outside AWS that use X.509 certificates, not OIDC. Option C is intended for workforce identity federation, not machine-to-machine authentication. Option D is invalid because AWS RAM does not provide identity federation or authentication capabilities.

This solution aligns with AWS best practices for secure, scalable, and low-overhead authentication for external workloads.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS IAM OIDC Identity Providers

AWS IAM Role Trust Policies

AWS best practices strongly discourage the use of long-term credentials and recommend cross-account IAM roles with temporary credentials for third-party access. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, creating an IAM role in the resource-owning account and allowing a trusted external AWS account to assume that role is the recommended pattern for external access.

By creating the IAM role in the company’s production account and specifying the consultant agency’s AWS account as the trusted principal, the company retains full control over permissions. The trust policy can enforce MFA by using the aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent condition key, ensuring that all access requires MFA. Access is granted through AWS Security Token Service (STS), which issues short-lived credentials.

Option A violates the requirement to avoid long-term credentials. Option B is designed for application user authentication, not AWS account access. Option C incorrectly places the role in the consultant’s account, reducing the company’s control over access.

This solution satisfies MFA enforcement, eliminates long-term credentials, and aligns with AWS third-party access best practices.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS IAM Cross-Account Access

AWS STS and MFA Enforcement

Network Load Balancers operate at Layer 4 and are optimized for extreme performance, ultra-low latency, and handling sudden traffic spikes. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, using a TCP listener on an NLB allows TLS traffic to pass through directly to backend containers without termination, preserving true end-to-end encryption.

This approach eliminates the overhead of decrypting and re-encrypting traffic at the load balancer, reducing latency and maximizing throughput. NLBs scale automatically to handle volatile traffic patterns and millions of requests per second.

Application Load Balancers operate at Layer 7 and introduce additional latency due to TLS termination and HTTP processing. Route 53 multivalue routing does not provide load balancing at the transport layer and does not ensure encryption handling.

AWS recommends NLB TCP pass-through for high-performance, end-to-end encrypted container workloads.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Elastic Load Balancing Architecture

Network Load Balancer Performance Characteristics