Web-Tier ELB Listener Security
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Cloud Conformity allows you to automate the auditing process of this resolution page. Register for a 14 day evaluation and check your compliance level for free!
Start a Free Trial Product featuresEnsure that your web-tier Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) listeners are using a secure protocol such as HTTPS/SSL to encrypt the communication between the web application clients and the load balancer. This conformity rule assumes that all AWS resources (including ELBs) provisioned in your web tier are tagged with <web_tier_tag>:<web_tier_tag_value>, where <web_tier_tag> represents the tag name and <web_tier_tag_value> the tag value. Prior to running this rule by the Cloud Conformity engine, the web-tier tags must be configured within the rule settings, on your account dashboard.
This rule can help you with the following compliance standards:
This rule resolution is part of the Cloud Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS
When a web-tier AWS ELB has no HTTPS/SSL listeners, the front-end connection between the clients and the load balancer is vulnerable to eavesdropping and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks. The risk becomes even higher when the application is working with sensitive data such as health and personal records, credentials and credit card numbers. Using an HTTPS/SSL listener for the ELBs within your web tier will ensure that the front-end traffic is encrypted over the SSL\TLS channel and the web client data is secured.
Note: Make sure that you replace all <web_tier_tag>:<web_tier_tag_value> tag placeholders found in the conformity rule content with your own tag name and value created for the web tier.
To check your web-tier AWS ELB listeners for secure (HTTPS/SSL) configurations, perform the following actions:
01 Sign in to your Cloud Conformity console, access Web-Tier ELB Listener Security conformity rule settings and copy the tag set defined for AWS resources available in your web tier (e.g. <web_tier_tag>:<web_tier_tag_value>).
02 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.
03 Navigate to EC2 dashboard at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
04 In the navigation panel, under LOAD BALANCING, click Load Balancers.
05 Paste the tag set copied at step no. 1 in the Filter by tags and attributes or search by keyword box, then add a space before and after the separation colon (i.e. <web_tier_tag> : <web_tier_tag_value>) and press Enter. This filtering procedure will return only the ELBs tagged for the web tier. If no results are returned, there are no ELBs tagged within your web tier and the audit process ends here. If the EC2 dashboard lists one or more load balancers, continue the audit process with the next step.
06 Select the web-tier ELB that you want to examine.
07 Select the Listeners tab from the bottom panel.
08 Under Load Balancer Protocol column, check the protocol for each listener available. If there is no listener using either the HTTPS (Secure HTTP) or the SSL (Secure TCP) protocol, the listeners configuration for the selected web-tier ELB is not secure and the front-end connection between the web clients and the load balancer is not encrypted.
09 Repeat steps no. 6 – 8 to verify other ELBs created for your web tier in the selected AWS region, for secure configurations.
10 Change the AWS region from the navigation bar and repeat steps no. 5 – 9 for other regions.
01 Sign in to your Cloud Conformity console, access Web-Tier ELB Listener Security conformity rule settings and copy the tag set defined for AWS resources available in your web tier (e.g. <web_tier_tag>:<web_tier_tag_value>).
02 Run describe-load-balancers command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) to list the names of all AWS ELBs provisioned in the selected AWS region:
aws elb describe-load-balancers --region us-east-1 --output table --query 'LoadBalancerDescriptions[*].LoadBalancerName'
03 The command output should return a table with the requested ELB names:
-------------------------- | DescribeLoadBalancers | +------------------------+ | cc-web-load-balancer | | cc-internal-app-elb | +------------------------+
04 Run describe-tags command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using the name of the load balancer that you want to examine as identifier and custom query filters to describe the tags defined for the ELB selected resource (if any):
aws elb describe-tags --region us-east-1 --load-balancer-name cc-web-load-balancer --query 'TagDescriptions[*].Tags[]'
05 The command request should return one of the following outputs:
[]
[
{
"Value": "Name",
"Key": "CC Prod ELB"
}
]
[
{
"Value": "<web_tier_tag_value>",
"Key": "<web_tier_tag>"
}
]
06 Run describe-load-balancers command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using the name of the web-tier ELB identified at the previous step to describe the resource listeners configuration and determine if the selected web-tier ELB is using secure listeners (HTTPS or SSL):
aws elb describe-load-balancers
--region us-east-1
--load-balancer-name cc-web-load-balancer
--query "LoadBalancerDescriptions[*].{ListenerDescriptions:ListenerDescriptions[?Listener.Protocol == 'HTTPS' || Listener.Protocol == 'SSL']}"
07 The command output should list the HTTPS/SSL listeners configuration details for the selected ELB:
[
{
"ListenerDescriptions": []
}
]
08 Repeat step no. 6 and 7 to verify other web-tier ELBs, provisioned within the selected AWS region, for secure configurations.
09 Change the AWS region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat steps no. 2 – 8 to perform the audit process for other regions.
To secure the connection between the web clients and your web-tier load balancer by using SSL encryption, update your ELB configuration to use listeners with HTTPS or SSL protocols (an X.509 SSL certificate is required). To implement HTTPS/SSL protocol for your web-tier ELB listeners, perform the following actions:
01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.
02 Navigate to EC2 dashboard at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
03 In the navigation panel, under LOAD BALANCING, click Load Balancers.
04 Select the web-tier ELB that you want to reconfigure (see Audit section part I to identify the right resource).
05 Select the Listeners tab from the bottom panel and click the Edit button under the available listener(s).
06 Inside the Edit listeners dialog box, click Add to add a new entry.
07 In the Load Balancer Protocol dropdown list, select HTTPS (Secure HTTP) or SSL (Secure TCP).
08 In the Cipher column, click Change and make sure the latest Predefined Security Policy selected is ELBSecurityPolicy-2016-08 (recommended). If you want to use a custom policy, select Custom Security Policy and configure your own policy. If you need to apply any changes click Save, otherwise click Cancel to return to the Edit listeners dialog box.
09 In the SSL Certificate column, click Change and select one of the following options:
10 Back to the Edit listeners dialog box, review the secure listeners configuration, then click Save. If successful, the following message will be displayed: “Finished updating listeners. Your listeners have been successfully updated.”. Click Close to return to the EC2 dashboard.
11 Repeat steps no. 4 – 10 for each web-tier ELB that needs to secure its front-end traffic, provisioned in the selected region.
12 Change the AWS region from the navigation bar and repeat steps no. 4 – 11 for other regions.
01 Depending on the AWS service used to manage your SSL certificates, perform one of the following actions
aws acm list-certificates --region us-east-1
{
"CertificateSummaryList": [
{
"CertificateArn": "arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:123456789012:certificate/12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012",
"DomainName": "www.cloudconformity.com"
}
]
}
aws iam list-server-certificates
{
"ServerCertificateMetadataList": [
{
"ServerCertificateName": "cc-frontend-certificate",
"Expiration": "2018-05-08T23:59:59Z",
"Path": "/",
"Arn": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:server-certificate/cc- frontend-certificate",
"UploadDate": "2017-02-09T10:51:08Z"
}
]
}
02 Run create-load-balancer-listeners command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) to create a new HTTPS listener for the selected web-tier ELB using the SSL certificate identified at the previous step. The following command example will create a front-end HTTPS listener for a web-tier ELB named "cc-web-load-balancer" using an SSL certificate identified by the ARN "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:server-certificate/cc-frontend-certificate" (the command does not produce an output):
aws elb create-load-balancer-listeners --region us-east-1 --load-balancer-name cc-web-load-balancer --listeners Protocol=HTTPS,LoadBalancerPort=443,InstanceProtocol=HTTP,InstancePort=80,SSLCertificateId=arn:aws:iam::123456789012:server-certificate/cc-frontend-certificate
03 Repeat step no. 2 for each web-tier ELB that needs to secure its front-end traffic, available in the selected region.
04 Change the AWS region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat steps no. 1 – 3 for other regions.
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