Automating Cloud Security Vulnerability Assessment and Alerting with Amazon Bedrock

Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner

As cloud technologies evolve rapidly, businesses are increasingly leveraging innovative solutions to enhance their services. However, with these advancements come significant security risks. Many enterprises depend on reactive security monitoring and alerting methods, which may not adequately protect them from vulnerabilities and external threats. To mitigate these risks, organizations must implement robust security measures in their cloud environments and adopt proactive monitoring strategies to bolster their security posture and ensure compliance.

This article introduces a proactive approach to assessing security vulnerabilities within your accounts and workloads using Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Bedrock, and other serverless AWS technologies. By identifying vulnerabilities in advance, organizations can issue timely alerts and recommendations to users, preventing reactive escalations and potential damages. The proactive security monitoring system offers personalized notifications via preferred channels such as email, SMS, or push notifications, summarizing identified security issues and providing actionable troubleshooting steps for swift resolution without escalation.

GuardDuty serves as a continuous threat detection service that monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior within your AWS environment. Utilizing machine learning (ML), anomaly detection, and malicious file discovery, GuardDuty leverages both AWS and industry-leading third-party sources to safeguard AWS accounts, workloads, and data. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon EventBridge, triggering events for newly generated vulnerability findings. This solution harnesses GuardDuty findings notifications through EventBridge to initiate AWS Step Functions, a serverless orchestration engine, which executes a defined state machine. The Step Functions state machine subsequently invokes AWS Lambda functions to obtain a summary of findings and remediation steps via Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that provides access to high-performing foundation models (FMs) from top AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon through a unified API. It also offers a comprehensive set of capabilities for building generative AI applications with a focus on security, privacy, and responsible AI practices.

By utilizing generative AI FMs on Amazon Bedrock, organizations can efficiently analyze extensive security datasets to identify patterns and anomalies indicative of potential threats or breaches. Moreover, these models can detect suspicious activities or vulnerabilities by recognizing patterns in network traffic, user behavior, or system logs. Generative AI can even anticipate future security threats by examining historical data and trends, enabling proactive security measures to thwart breaches before they happen. This automation enhances efficiency and reduces response times to security threats.

Solution Overview

The proposed solution leverages the built-in integration between GuardDuty and EventBridge to generate event notifications for any new vulnerabilities detected in your AWS accounts or workloads. Users can configure EventBridge rules to filter findings by severity, ensuring that high-severity issues are addressed first. The EventBridge rule activates a Step Functions workflow, which invokes a Lambda function with the details of the GuardDuty findings. The Lambda function interfaces with Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet model through Amazon Bedrock APIs to provide a summary of findings and mitigation steps. The Step Functions workflow then communicates these findings and remediation notifications to users via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). While this example uses email notifications, the solution can be expanded to include SMS or push notifications.

The key services involved in the solution include:

• Amazon Bedrock: Integrated with Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet model to deliver summarized insights into security vulnerabilities and remediation actions.
• Amazon EventBridge: A serverless event bus that enables event reception, filtering, transformation, routing, and delivery.
• Amazon GuardDuty: Utilized for its threat detection capabilities to identify and respond to security threats.
• IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows specification of access permissions for AWS services and resources, ensuring adherence to the principle of least privilege.
• AWS Lambda: A compute service that executes code in response to events, efficiently managing compute resources.
• Amazon SNS: A managed service that facilitates message delivery from publishers to subscribers.
• AWS Step Functions: A visual workflow service that simplifies the orchestration of AWS services to automate processes and build distributed applications.

Workflow Steps

1. GuardDuty triggers an EventBridge rule that can filter findings based on severity.
2. Findings are exported to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
3. The EventBridge rule activates a Step Functions workflow.
4. The Step Functions workflow invokes a Lambda function to retrieve details of the vulnerability findings.
5. The Lambda function formulates a prompt with the vulnerability details and sends it to Anthropic’s Claude 3 using Amazon Bedrock APIs. The response is returned to the Step Functions workflow.
6. The Step Functions workflow publishes the findings details to an SNS topic, sending email notifications to subscribers.
7. Amazon SNS delivers emails to the subscribers.
8. Logs for the Step Functions workflow and Lambda function are stored in Amazon CloudWatch. For detailed guidance, refer to Configure logging in the Step Functions console to store logs in CloudWatch. CloudWatch logs utilize server-side encryption for data at rest by default.

Solution Benefits

The solution provides numerous advantages for end-users, including:

• Real-time visibility: Offers a comprehensive overview of your cloud environment’s security posture through an intuitive omnichannel support solution.
• Actionable insights: Enables users to drill down into specific security alerts and vulnerabilities generated using generative AI, allowing for prioritized and effective responses.
• Proactive customizable reporting: Users can resolve various issues before escalation by obtaining summary reports with actionable recommendations.

Prerequisites

To implement this solution, complete the following steps:

• Enable GuardDuty in your account to generate findings.
• Provision least privilege IAM permissions for AWS resources such as Step Functions and Lambda functions to perform desired actions.

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