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Nikolay Dimitrov
Nikolay Dimitrov

Reputation: 1896

Use cases for TLS inside AWS VPC?

I just watched a presentation from AWS about ElastiCache and they mention that if you want to strengthen security you can use TLS for data in transit.

I really can't see the benefits of that considering we also lose a good percentage of performance. Anyone aware of any use-cases for TLS inside AWS VPC?

One of my thoughts was that a compromised instance inside the same VPC can sniff traffic, but that is apparently not possible: https://aws.amazon.com/answers/networking/vpc-security-capabilities/#Packet_Sniffing

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2344

Answers (2)

Rodrigo Murillo
Rodrigo Murillo

Reputation: 13638

Yes it's common in security situations where you are dealing with highly sensitive data, you would certainly consider both encryption of data in transit and at rest.

It mainly depends on the security policy of the application runs under. The security policy would be established by management and intransit encryption can be mandatory in HIPAA or PCI applications.

Possible attack vectors are "man-in-the middle" or unauthorized access by internal users.

I'm not sure what the performance hit would be, but I don't think it would be significant.

Also note this from the article you reference:

While Amazon EC2 does provide ample data protection between customers by default, as a standard practice it is best to always encrypt sensitive traffic.

Upvotes: 3

Jason Wadsworth
Jason Wadsworth

Reputation: 8885

In general, you should have Zero Trust of anything in your network.

Upvotes: 0

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