5.1.1 Ensure EBS volume encryption is enabled in all regions

Information

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) supports encryption at rest when using the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service. While disabled by default, forcing encryption at EBS volume creation is supported.

Encrypting data at rest reduces the likelihood of unintentional exposure and can nullify the impact of disclosure if the encryption remains unbroken.

Solution

From Console:

- Login to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon EC2 console using

https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/

.
- Under Account attributes click EBS encryption
- Click Manage
- Check the Enable box.
- Click Update EBS encryption
- Repeat for each region in which EBS volume encryption is not enabled by default.

Note: EBS volume encryption is configured per region.

From Command Line:

- Run the following command:

aws --region <region> ec2 enable-ebs-encryption-by-default <xhtml:ol start="2"> - Verify that "EbsEncryptionByDefault": true is displayed.
- Repeat for each region in which EBS volume encryption is not enabled by default.

Note: EBS volume encryption is configured per region.

Impact:

Losing access to or removing the KMS key used by the EBS volumes will result in the inability to access the volumes.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/19631

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION, SYSTEM AND COMMUNICATIONS PROTECTION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1), 800-53|SC-28, 800-53|SC-28(1), CSCv7|14.8

Plugin: amazon_aws

Control ID: 1410984732744b07ac7a66f621cb0b2ccbb6a08604cbf508582eeb71661a0c9d