Amazon Web Services Updated SOA-C02 Exam Questions and Answers by orin

To enable decryption of objects, the role only requires minimal permissions with least privilege:

kms

Necessary for reading and decrypting the data encrypted with KMS.

kms

Allows the role to check key properties, confirming it’s the correct key for decryption.

kms

Useful if multiple keys are in use and validation against an alias is needed.

These permissions are sufficient for decryption without granting additional permissions like encryption or key management.

The most operationally efficient solution to ensure that administrator passwords for Amazon RDS DB instances are changed at least annually is to use AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation.

AWS Secrets Manager:

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources without the upfront cost and complexity of managing your own hardware security infrastructure.

Secrets Manager enables you to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

Configure Automatic Rotation:

Store the database credentials in AWS Secrets Manager.

Configure the secret to rotate automatically every 365 days.

AWS Secrets Manager provides built-in integration for rotating credentials for supported databases, including Amazon RDS.

Steps to Configure:

Open the Secrets Manager console.

Create a new secret and provide the necessary database credentials.

Enable automatic rotation and set the rotation interval to 365 days.

Secrets Manager will handle the rotation process, updating the credentials in the database and ensuring they are securely stored.

References:

AWS Secrets Manager

Rotating Your AWS Secrets Manager Secrets

To reduce the time required for new instances to become available in an Auto Scaling group, pre-installing the necessary software in the AMI used by the Auto Scaling group is the most effective solution.

Use EC2 Image Builder:

Utilize EC2 Image Builder to create a custom AMI that includes all the required software and configurations.

This reduces the setup time during instance launch, as the user data script will no longer need to install the software.

The problem requires modifying the inbound SSH rule to restrict access to a list of trusted IPs instead of deleting it entirely. AWS Config rules can be configured with automatic remediation actions using either Systems Manager Automation runbooks or Lambda functions. However, AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks are often more appropriate for managing infrastructure changes like security group modifications because they are reusable, parameterized, and easier to audit.

Create a Systems Manager Automation runbook: This runbook will contain steps to add or modify the existing security group rule, allowing SSH access only from the specified IP addresses.

Update the AWS Config rule: Modify the Config rule to call this new runbook for its automatic remediation. This will prevent deletion of the SSH rule and instead update it based on the IP list.