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by Rosalina William
The theme of AWS re:Inforce 2024 is security in the age of generative AI. (Shocking, right?) And while there was talk of AI, the bulk of the keynote focused on the people behind the technology and the importance of trust and culture in security and innovation.
Chris Betz, CISO of AWS; Steve Schmidt, CSO of Amazon; and Ash Edmondson, Eli Lilly AVP of Security Architecture and Engineering, kicked off the conference, explaining how AWS secures the cloud, why organizations need a culture of security, and how to secure generative AI at scale.
They also shared AWS product announcements, including new capabilities to advance Zero Trust and generative AI security. Here are the key takeaways from their talk.
Chris began by talking about how AWS secures the cloud. He identified three pieces that contribute
to their robust security culture.
First, they have dedicated time each week to security. “Every Friday, AWS leadership meet with
individual service teams and discuss important security issues,” he said.
These weekly meetings shape the roadmap, help hold leaders accountable for security,
and have a deep cultural impact. “Where we spend our time says a lot about what matters,”
said Chris.
They also nurture a culture of escalation that views escalations not as failures or shortcomings
but as necessary steps to prevent issues that could impact security for customers. “When there’s
a security issue, we’re empowered and encouraged to escalate,” explained Chris. “We’re expected
to act fast and decisively. Escalations allow us to do both.”
Another part of their culture? Unified teams. When an issue arises, it’s not uncommon for teams to
play ping pong with tickets, passing issues from team to team and increasing the time to resolution.
At AWS, all tickets are escalated to the security team, who does whatever is necessary to get the
issue resolved, lowering the mean time to resolution across the organization.
While these practices play a heavy role in AWS’s overall security culture, implementing them in your organization won’t instantaneously drive results. “Culture doesn’t develop overnight. Building a
security culture requires constant investment and focus,” said Chris.
Chris also noted the rise of the Rust programming language for security. “Rust is the fastest-growing development language at AWS,” said Chris. “We’re actually rewriting critical code in Rust.”
As a memory-safe language, Rust eliminates memory-related and threatening issues that may lead to security vulnerabilities. Thanks to its minimal runtime, it also reduces overall attack surface and enables teams to catch potential issues earlier, making development faster.
Chris mentioned AWS Libcrypto for Rust, their open-source cryptographic library, to help teams meet government cryptographic requirements.
“We’re excited about the future of Rust,” he said.
AWS’s investment in automated reasoning was another key topic. Chris explained the importance of testing and fixing to ensure systems behave in the expected way.
Positive testing ensures the system behaves in the expected way, while negative testing examines unexpected conditions to identify potential vulnerabilities. But there’s only so many inputs you can test.
That’s where automated reasoning comes into play. “Automated reasoning enables us to see what behaviors a system is capable of and then identify unwanted behaviors to fix them,” said Chris.
In other words, it allows you to test and fix for infinite inputs, using logic to analyze and verify correctness. Automated reasoning helps verify the correctness of cryptographic protocols and authorization logic, as well as verify security mechanisms and aid policy and network control.
Ash took the stage to explain the principles behind pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s cloud security. The main theme? Trust.
She compared trust in the cloud to leaving her dog, Clyde, at home while she travels. She explained that she has an excellent dog sitter, and she can check in on Clyde anytime with her home cameras. But that still doesn’t alleviate all of her worries.
Cloud security is the same. “Trusting a cloud provider . . . means finding the balance between control and delegation,” she said.
At Eli Lilly, this includes robust security measures, a culture of transparency and collaboration, and seeking out expert advice. This trust is key to delivering for their customers. “By prioritizing trust at every stage, we empower teams to innovate.”
Of course, the keynote wouldn’t have been complete without some focus on generative AI. How can teams use machine learning and generative AI securely? At the end of the day, it circles back to the culture of security.
“Security fundamentals are evergreen,” said Steve. When teams across your organization possess foundational security skills, they can adopt emerging technologies and innovate faster without sacrificing governance, compliance, resilience, and risk control.
He then shared some of his tips from Amazon on creating a culture of security around generative AI:
Create generative AI security standards: Set guidelines on how to handle confidential data, models, and prompts. This ensures security is part of the process from the start.
Create a threat modeling guide for genAI applications: Help teams work through the risks of generative AI applications and how to mitigate them systematically.
Share internal testing and tools: Share test knowledge in one place so everyone can learn from each other.
Conduct security reviews: Create specific security review tasks for AI-enabled applications. Continually verify their security.
Generative AI security requires an iterative review and audit process. “In AI, the model is the code. Responses change over time as users interact with them. You’re never done with AppSec reviews,” said Steve.
“We know that organizations with robust Zero Trust architectures are better protected against cybersecurity incidents,” said Chris.
But he also acknowledged the challenges of maintaining a Zero Trust approach:
The need for strong identity and access management
Complex network segmentation
Hybrid environments
The expanding application landscape and workforce mobility
The constantly evolving threat landscape, need for seamless integration across tools, and complexity of maintaining accurate and updated configurations as environments change create additional roadblocks. The new AWS features announced aim to address these challenges.
An AWS keynote wouldn’t be complete without new product announcements. Chris announced several new security-focused features.
Passkeys as 2nd-factor authenticators in AWS IAM: Users can use passkeys for multi-factor authentication in AWS IAM. This built-in authentication further secures sign-ins across devices.
AWS IAM Access Analyzer unused access findings recommendations: Security teams can view unused roles, access keys, and passwords, get prescriptive guidance on the findings, and refine unused access.
Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection for Amazon S3: Automatically scan objects for malware as they’re uploaded to S3 and isolate or eliminate detected malware—without degrading scale, latency, or resiliency in S3.
Generative-AI-powered query generation in AWS CloudTrail Lake: Security teams can use natural language to generate SQL queries, making security and compliance faster and easier.
“At the end of the day, culture is at the root of it all. It’s culture that drives us to design systems that are secure by design, not bolted on as an afterthought,” said Chris.