Here's a list of a few essential tips and best practices that you ought to keep in mind when working with AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and security in general:
- Analyze and audit security configurations periodically: Although AWS provides a variety of services for safeguarding your cloud environment, it is the organization's mandate to ensure that the security rules are enforced and periodically verified against any potential misconfigurations.
- Complete audit trail for all users: Ensure that all resource creation, modifications, and terminations are tracked minutely for each user, including root, IAM, and federated users.
- Enable CloudTrail globally: By enabling logging at a global level, CloudTrail can essentially capture logs for all AWS services, including the global ones such as IAM, CloudFront, and so on.
- Enable CloudTrail Log file validation: An optional setting, however it is always recommended to enable CloudTrail Log file validations for an added layer of integrity and security.
- Enable access logging for CloudTrail and config buckets: Since both CloudTrail and config leverage S3 buckets to store the captured logs, it is always recommended that you enable access tracking for them to log unwarranted and unauthorized access. Alternatively, you can also restrict access to the logs and buckets to a specialized group of users as well.
- Encrypt log files at rest: Encrypting the log files at rest provides an additional layer of protection from unauthorized viewing or editing of the logged data.