AWS Certified Security - Specialty

AWS Certified Security - Specialty practice questions, page 3 of 21, with answer review and explanations.

Question 11

An organization wants to deploy a three-tier web application whereby the application servers run on Amazon EC2 instances. These EC2 instances need access to credentials that they will use to authenticate their SQL connections to an Amazon RDS DB instance. Also, AWS Lambda functions must issue queries to the RDS database by using the same database credentials. The credentials must be stored so that the EC2 instances and the Lambda functions can access them. No other access is allowed. The access logs must record when the credentials were accessed and by whom. What should the Security Engineer do to meet these requirements?

  1. Store the database credentials in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Create an IAM role with access to AWS KMS by using the EC2 and Lambda service principals in the role's trust policy. Add the role to an EC2 instance profile. Attach the instance profile to the EC2 instances. Set up Lambda to use the new role for execution.
  2. Store the database credentials in AWS KMS. Create an IAM role with access to KMS by using the EC2 and Lambda service principals in the role's trust policy. Add the role to an EC2 instance profile. Attach the instance profile to the EC2 instances and the Lambda function.
  3. Store the database credentials in AWS Secrets Manager. Create an IAM role with access to Secrets Manager by using the EC2 and Lambda service principals in the role's trust policy. Add the role to an EC2 instance profile. Attach the instance profile to the EC2 instances and the Lambda function.
  4. Store the database credentials in AWS Secrets Manager. Create an IAM role with access to Secrets Manager by using the EC2 and Lambda service principals in the role's trust policy. Add the role to an EC2 instance profile. Attach the instance profile to the EC2 instances. Set up Lambda to use the new role for execution.

Question 12

A company has a customer master key (CMK) with imported key materials. Company policy requires that all encryption keys must be rotated every year. What can be done to implement the above policy?

  1. Enable automatic key rotation annually for the CMK.
  2. Use AWS Command Line Interface to create an AWS Lambda function to rotate the existing CMK annually.
  3. Import new key material to the existing CMK and manually rotate the CMK.
  4. Create a new CMK, import new key material to it, and point the key alias to the new CMK.

Question 13

A water utility company uses a number of Amazon EC2 instances to manage updates to a fleet of 2,000 Internet of Things (IoT) field devices that monitor water quality. These devices each have unique access credentials. An operational safety policy requires that access to specific credentials is independently auditable. What is the MOST cost-effective way to manage the storage of credentials?

  1. Use AWS Systems Manager to store the credentials as Secure Strings Parameters. Secure by using an AWS KMS key.
  2. Use AWS Key Management System to store a master key, which is used to encrypt the credentials. The encrypted credentials are stored in an Amazon RDS instance.
  3. Use AWS Secrets Manager to store the credentials.
  4. Store the credentials in a JSON file on Amazon S3 with server-side encryption.

Question 14

An organization is using Amazon CloudWatch Logs with agents deployed on its Linux Amazon EC2 instances. The agent configuration files have been checked and the application log files to be pushed are configured correctly. A review has identified that logging from specific instances is missing. Which steps should be taken to troubleshoot the issue? (Choose two.)

  1. Use an EC2 run command to confirm that the ג€awslogsג€ service is running on all instances.
  2. Verify that the permissions used by the agent allow creation of log groups/streams and to put log events.
  3. Check whether any application log entries were rejected because of invalid time stamps by reviewing /var/cwlogs/rejects.log.
  4. Check that the trust relationship grants the service ג€cwlogs.amazonaws.comג€ permission to write objects to the Amazon S3 staging bucket.
  5. Verify that the time zone on the application servers is in UTC.

Question 15

A Security Engineer must design a solution that enables the incident Response team to audit for changes to a user's IAM permissions in the case of a security incident. How can this be accomplished?

  1. Use AWS Config to review the IAM policy assigned to users before and after the incident.
  2. Run the GenerateCredentialReport via the AWS CLI, and copy the output to Amazon S3 daily for auditing purposes.
  3. Copy AWS CloudFormation templates to S3, and audit for changes from the template.
  4. Use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to deploy images, and review AWS CloudTrail logs for changes.