Chapter 1. Principles and Concepts
Yes, this is a practical guide, but we do need to cover a few cloud-relevant security principles at a high level before we dive into the practical bits. If you’re a seasoned security professional new to the cloud, you may want to skim down to “The Cloud Shared Responsibility Model”.
Least Privilege
The principle of least privilege simply states that people or automated tools should be able to access only what they need to do their jobs, and no more. It’s easy to forget the automation part of this; for example, a component accessing a database should not use credentials that allow write access to the database if write access isn’t needed.
A practical application of least privilege often means that your access policies are deny by default. That is, users are granted no (or very few) privileges by default, and they need to go through the request and approval process for any privileges they require.
For cloud environments, some of your administrators will need to have access to the cloud console—a web page that allows you to create, modify, and destroy cloud assets such as virtual machines. With many providers, anyone with access to your cloud console will have godlike privileges by default for everything managed by that cloud provider. This might include the ability to read, modify, or destroy data from any part of the cloud environment, regardless of what controls are in place on the operating systems of the provisioned systems. For this reason, ...