Encrypting S3 Buckets and EBS Volumes Using KMS

In today’s digital landscape, data security is of utmost importance to organizations of all sizes. As businesses increasingly migrate their infrastructure to cloud environments, securing the data stored in the cloud becomes critical. Among the AWS cloud services, two fundamental AWS services for data storage are Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). To add an extra layer of security, we can use the cryptography service of AWS—Key Management Service (KMS). KMS allows users to apply encryption to these storage services, resulting in enhanced data security.

In this Cloud Lab, you’ll learn how to use the KMS provided by AWS to encrypt S3 and EBS storage. You’ll start by creating a customer managed KMS key, which will be used for encryption. After that, you’ll use that key and create an encrypted EBS volume. You’ll then log in as an IAM user who doesn’t have access to use the KMS keys and try to access the encrypted EBS bucket. Then you’ll move on to learning about S3 encryption using KMS. To start off, you’ll explore various types of data encryption methods available for Amazon S3 and create an encrypted S3 bucket. You’ll also use AWS SDK to encrypt a document and upload it to the encrypted S3 bucket. You’ll then switch to the IAM user’s account and try to access the encrypted S3 bucket. After that, you’ll modify the key policy of your KMS key to allow the IAM user to access the key and see how that changes the accessibility of the IAM user to the document.

After completing this Cloud Lab, you’ll be well-equipped with the knowledge and skills to utilize the KMS for creating and managing encryption keys effectively. This hands-on Cloud Lab will empower you to enhance the security of your data by implementing encryption measures.

The following is the high-level architecture diagram of the infrastructure that you’ll create in this Cloud Lab: