How to Secure Data with AWS KMS Server-Side Encryption

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Introduction to AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

In today’s digital landscape, safeguarding sensitive data is critical. As organizations increasingly migrate from legacy systems to the cloud, robust encryption and key management solutions become essential to secure data at rest as well as in transit. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a fully managed service that helps you create, control, and manage encryption keys securely across AWS services and your applications. 

Whether you’re protecting customer information, securing application secrets, or encrypting sensitive documents, AWS KMS provides a scalable and cost-effective solution that integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. In this blog, we will explore how AWS KMS works, its core features, and how it can enhance your security posture in the cloud. Additionally, we will walk through practical use cases and best practices for implementing KMS in your AWS environment.

Creating Customer-Managed Keys

There are essentially two types of keys: AWS-managed keys and customer-managed keys. AWS-managed keys are automatically created and managed by AWS on our behalf, while customer-managed keys are created and controlled by users for their specific applications.

From the console, navigate to KMS and select Customer-Managed Keys. Click Create Key and choose Symmetric as the key type. For Key Usage, select Encrypt and Decrypt. In the advanced options, the default key material origin will be KMS. Under Regionality, select Single-Region Key.

Proceed to the "Add Labels" section, assign an alias of your choice, and include any necessary tags. Next, navigate to "Define Key Administrative Permissions" and specify the IAM users and roles authorized to manage the key through the KMS API. Then, move to "Define Key Usage Permissions" and select the IAM users and roles permitted to use the key for cryptographic operations. Review the configurations and click on finish


List of customer-managed keys 

Testing AWS KMS Keys with Lambda Environment Variables

We have successfully created a KMS key under customer-managed keys. Next, we will use this key to encrypt the environment variables in the Lambda function, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure and hidden. The KMS decrypt API will be invoked within the function itself to decrypt these environment variables during runtime. This ensures that decryption happens securely in transit, maintaining data confidentiality while allowing the function to access the necessary sensitive information seamlessly.

Create a new Lambda function or select an existing one. Navigate to the Configuration tab and go to Environment Variables. Add the key names and corresponding values. Next, proceed to Encryption Configuration, enable encryption in transit, and select the encryption option. Choose the AWS KMS key that was previously created and click Encrypt. This will securely encrypt the environment variable values.


The environment variable values are now securely encrypted. Within the Lambda function, the KMS decrypt API must be called to decrypt the values during the function's runtime.

Conclusion

In this blog, we explored how to create AWS KMS keys and demonstrated their practical application by encrypting Lambda environment variables. We also discussed the decryption process to securely access sensitive data within the Lambda function. By integrating KMS with Lambda, you can enhance your application's security and ensure that sensitive information remains encrypted at rest and in transit.

Understanding and implementing AWS KMS in Lambda functions is a crucial step in building secure, scalable, and production-ready cloud applications. I encourage you to experiment further with KMS to encrypt additional resources and explore best practices for key management to maintain a secure cloud environment.

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