USB has always been a security concern. A malicious device that has been plugged into a USB port could impersonate a phantom keyboard and log all your keystrokes. Another popular exploit was to make use of the Windows autorun feature and have a storage device deliver a software exploit payload. I could go on, but you have heard it all before. Thunderbolt The Thunderbolt 3 port is a recent addition to PCs.

In the last post, we discussed the concepts behind the valet key pattern. In this post, I will walk through how to perform this operation on AWS. In AWS, in general, all bucket access is controlled by IAM. AWS also has the concept of signed urls, which allow someone to share a URL (very similar to SAS tokens in Azure). We will look at both techniques in this post.

This is a continuation from a previous article and gets a lot more technical. It is not a part 2, but a branch. Think of it has a hub and spoke style collection of articles. This is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) spoke. I will be focusing on how to automate the user management on a jump host within the AWS cloud. Security First I know I am going to ruffle some feathers with this, but I find AWS takes a more of a hard-lined approach to security then the other public cloud providers.

In the last post, we discussed the concepts behind the valet key pattern. In this post, I will walk through how to perform this operation on Azure. In Azure, we can accomplish the creation of temporary access by use of shared access signature (SAS) tokens. You can read more about these tokens here (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-dotnet-shared-access-signature-part-1) Please NOTE: In a previous post, I mentioned that SAS tokens were container level elements. In fact, I was wrong about this.

So far in this series, we’ve covered a lot of the technical aspects of object storage and have explored how they are implemented in both cloud providers. For this post, I’d like to examine a cloud architecture pattern called the valet key pattern, and discuss how to implement this in both Azure and AWS. In this post, lets talk about what the valet key pattern is. Please note that most of this content is based off of the cloud architecture patterns book.

It’s no secret that I believe privacy is going to be a major issue of discussion and chatter this year. As part of our first monthly newsletter, Keep Secure focused on user privacy and how to stay safe online. We’ve also chatted a bit about it in our security tasks for 2019 post. (https://www.keepsecure.ca/blog/this-year-dont-get-zucked/) About the middle of last year, GlaxoSmithKline (a pharmaceutical company) announced a partnership with 23andMe (a personal genomics and biotechnology company), and later moved to buy them.