This credential helps organizations identify and develop talent with critical skills for implementing cloud initiatives. Earning AWS Certified Security – Specialty validates expertise in securing data and workloads in the AWS Cloud.
Exam overview
Level: Specialty
Length: 170 minutes to complete the exam
Cost: 300 USD
Visit Exam pricing for additional cost information.
Format: 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response
Delivery method: Pearson VUE and PSI; testing center or online proctored exam
Who should take this exam?
AWS Certified Security – Specialty is intended for individuals who perform a security role and have at least two years of hands-on experience securing AWS workloads. Before you take this exam, we recommend you have:
Five years of IT security experience in designing and implementing security solutions and at least two years of hands-on experience in securing AWS workloads
Working knowledge of AWS security services and features of services to provide a secure production environment and an understanding of security operations and risks
Knowledge of the AWS shared responsibility model and its application; security controls for workloads on AWS; logging and monitoring strategies; cloud security threat models; patch management and security automation; ways to enhance AWS security services with third-party tools and services; and disaster recovery controls, including BCP and backups, encryption, access control, and data retention
Understanding of specialized data classifications and AWS data protection mechanisms, data-encryption methods and AWS mechanisms to implement them, and secure internet protocols and AWS mechanisms to implement them
Ability to make tradeoff decisions with regard to cost, security, and deployment complexity to meet a set of application requirements
What does it take to earn this certification?
To earn this certification, you’ll need to take and pass the AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam (SCS-C01). The exam features a combination of two question formats: multiple choice and multiple response. Additional information, such as the exam content outline and passing score, is in the exam guide.
Introduction
The AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) exam is intended for individuals who perform a security role. The exam validates a candidate’s ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge about securing the AWS platform.
The exam also validates whether a candidate has the following:
An understanding of specialized data classifications and AWS data protection mechanisms
An understanding of data-encryption methods and AWS mechanisms to implement them
An understanding of secure internet protocols and AWS mechanisms to implement them
A working knowledge of AWS security services and features of services to provide a secure production environment
Competency from 2 or more years of production deployment experience in using AWS security services and features
The ability to make tradeoff decisions with regard to cost, security, and deployment complexity to meet a set of application requirements
An understanding of security operations and risks
Target candidate description
The target candidate should have 5 years of IT security experience in designing and implementing security solutions. Additionally, the target candidate should have 2 or more years of hands-on experience in securing AWS workloads.
Recommended AWS knowledge
The target candidate should have the following knowledge: The AWS shared responsibility model and its application
Security controls for workloads on AWS
Logging and monitoring strategies
Cloud security threat models
Patch management and security automation
Ways to enhance AWS security services with third-party tools and services
Disaster recovery controls, including BCP and backups
Encryption
Access control
Data retention
What is considered out of scope for the target candidate?
The following is a non-exhaustive list of related job tasks that the target candidate is not expected to be able to perform. These items are considered out of scope for the exam:
Create or write configurations
Implement (SysOps)
Demonstrate scripting in a specific language (for example, Perl or Java)
For a detailed list of specific tools and technologies that might be covered on the exam, as well as lists of in-scope and out-of-scope AWS services, refer to the Appendix.
Exam content
Response types
There are two types of questions on the exam:
Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)
Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose. Distractors are generally plausible responses that match the content area.
Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50 questions that will affect your score.
Unscored content
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
Exam results
The AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) exam is a pass or fail exam. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 750. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether or not you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.
Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. This information is intended to provide general feedback about your exam performance. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.
Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when interpreting section-level feedback.
Content outline
This exam guide includes weightings, test domains, and objectives for the exam. It is not a comprehensive listing of the content on the exam. However, additional context for each of the objectives is available to help guide your preparation for the exam. The following table lists the main content domains and their weightings. The table precedes the complete exam content outline, which includes the additional context. The percentage in each domain represents only scored content. Domain % of Exam
Domain 1: Incident Response 12%
Domain 2: Logging and Monitoring 20%
Domain 3: Infrastructure Security 26%
Domain 4: Identity and Access Management 20%
Domain 5: Data Protection 22%
TOTAL 100%
Domain 1: Incident Response
1.1 Given an AWS abuse notice, evaluate the suspected compromised instance or exposed access keys.
Given an AWS Abuse report about an EC2 instance, securely isolate the instance as part of a forensic investigation.
Analyze logs relevant to a reported instance to verify a breach, and collect relevant data.
Capture a memory dump from a suspected instance for later deep analysis or for legal compliance reasons.
1.2 Verify that the Incident Response plan includes relevant AWS services.
Determine if changes to baseline security configuration have been made.
Determine if list omits services, processes, or procedures which facilitate Incident Response.
Recommend services, processes, procedures to remediate gaps.
1.3 Evaluate the configuration of automated alerting, and execute possible remediation of security-related incidents and emerging issues.
Automate evaluation of conformance with rules for new/changed/removed resources.
Apply rule-based alerts for common infrastructure misconfigurations.
Review previous security incidents and recommend improvements to existing systems.
Domain 2: Logging and Monitoring
2.1 Design and implement security monitoring and alerting.
Analyze architecture and identify monitoring requirements and sources for monitoring statistics.
Analyze architecture to determine which AWS services can be used to automate monitoring and alerting.
Analyze the requirements for custom application monitoring, and determine how this could be achieved.
Set up automated tools/scripts to perform regular audits.
Given a custom application which is not reporting its statistics, analyze the configuration and remediate.
Review audit trails of system and user activity.
2.3 Design and implement a logging solution.
Analyze architecture and identify logging requirements and sources for log ingestion.
Analyze requirements and implement durable and secure log storage according to AWS best practices.
Analyze architecture to determine which AWS services can be used to automate log ingestion and analysis.
2.4 Troubleshoot logging solutions.
Given the absence of logs, determine the incorrect configuration and define remediation steps.
Analyze logging access permissions to determine incorrect configuration and define remediation steps.
Based on the security policy requirements, determine the correct log level, type, and sources.
Domain 3: Infrastructure Security
3.1 Design edge security on AWS.
For a given workload, assess and limit the attack surface.
Reduce blast radius (e.g. by distributing applications across accounts and regions).
Choose appropriate AWS and/or third-party edge services such as WAF, CloudFront and Route 53 to protect against DDoS or filter application-level attacks.
Given a set of edge protection requirements for an application, evaluate the mechanisms to prevent and detect intrusions for compliance and recommend required changes.
Test WAF rules to ensure they block malicious traffic.
3.2 Design and implement a secure network infrastructure.
Disable any unnecessary network ports and protocols.
Given a set of edge protection requirements, evaluate the security groups and NACLs of an application for compliance and recommend required changes.
Given security requirements, decide on network segmentation (e.g. security groups and NACLs) that allow the minimum ingress/egress access required.
Determine the use case for VPN or Direct Connect.
Determine the use case for enabling VPC Flow Logs.
Given a description of the network infrastructure for a VPC, analyze the use of subnets and gateways for secure operation.
3.3 Troubleshoot a secure network infrastructure.
Determine where network traffic flow is being denied.
Given a configuration, confirm security groups and NACLs have been implemented correctly.
3.4 Design and implement host-based security.
Given security requirements, install and configure host-based protections including Inspector, SSM.
Decide when to use host-based firewall like iptables.
Recommend methods for host hardening and monitoring.
Domain 4: Identity and Access Management
4.1 Design and implement a scalable authorization and authentication system to access AWS resources.
Given a description of a workload, analyze the access control configuration for AWS services and make recommendations that reduce risk.
Given a description how an organization manages their AWS accounts, verify security of their root user.
Given your organization’s compliance requirements, determine when to apply user policies and resource policies.
Within an organization’s policy, determine when to federate a directory services to IAM.
Design a scalable authorization model that includes users, groups, roles, and policies.
Identify and restrict individual users of data and AWS resources.
Review policies to establish that users/systems are restricted from performing functions beyond their responsibility, and also enforce proper separation of duties.
4.2 Troubleshoot an authorization and authentication system to access AWS resources.
Investigate a user’s inability to access S3 bucket contents.
Investigate a user’s inability to switch roles to a different account.
Investigate an Amazon EC2 instance’s inability to access a given AWS resource.
Domain 5: Data Protection
5.1 Design and implement key management and use.
Analyze a given scenario to determine an appropriate key management solution.
Given a set of data protection requirements, evaluate key usage and recommend required changes.
Determine and control the blast radius of a key compromise event and design a solution to contain the same.
5.2 Troubleshoot key management.
Break down the difference between a KMS key grant and IAM policy.
Deduce the precedence given different conflicting policies for a given key.
Determine when and how to revoke permissions for a user or service in the event of a compromise.
5.3 Design and implement a data encryption solution for data at rest and data in transit.
Given a set of data protection requirements, evaluate the security of the data at rest in a workload and recommend required changes.
Verify policy on a key such that it can only be used by specific AWS services.
Distinguish the compliance state of data through tag-based data classifications and automate remediation.
Evaluate a number of transport encryption techniques and select the appropriate method (i.e. TLS, IPsec, client-side KMS encryption). are grouped according to their primary functions. While some of these technologies will likely be covered more than others on the exam, the order and placement of them in this list is no indication of relative weight or importance:
AWS CLI
AWS SDK
AWS Management Console
Network analysis tools (packet capture and flow captures)
SSH/RDP
Signature Version 4
TLS
Certificate management
Infrastructure as code (IaC)
AWS services and features
Note: Security affects all AWS services. Many services do not appear in this list because the overall service is out of scope, but the security aspects of the service are in scope. For example, a candidate for this exam would not be asked about the steps to set up replication for an S3 bucket, but the candidate might be asked about configuring an S3 bucket policy.
Management and Governance:
AWS Audit Manager
AWS CloudTrail
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Config
AWS Organizations
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Trusted Advisor
Networking and Content Delivery: Amazon Detective
AWS Firewall Manager
AWS Network Firewall
AWS Security Hub
AWS Shield
Amazon VPC
o VPC endpoints
o Network ACLs
o Security groups
AWS WAF
Security, Identity, and Compliance:
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
AWS CloudHSM
AWS Directory Service
Amazon GuardDuty
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Amazon Inspector
AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
Amazon Macie
AWS Single Sign-On
Out-of-scope AWS services and features
The following is a non-exhaustive list of AWS services and features that are not covered on the exam. These services and features do not represent every AWS offering that is excluded from the exam content. Services or features that are entirely unrelated to the target job roles for the exam are excluded from this list because they are assumed to be irrelevant.
Out-of-scope AWS services and features include the following:
Application development services
IoT services
Machine learning (ML) services
Media services
Migration and transfer services
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QUESTION 1
The Security team believes that a former employee may have gained unauthorized access to AWS resources sometime in the past 3 months by using an identified access key.
What approach would enable the Security team to find out what the former employee may have done within AWS?
A. Use the AWS CloudTrail console to search for user activity.
B. Use the Amazon CloudWatch Logs console to filter CloudTrail data by user.
C. Use AWS Config to see what actions were taken by the user.
D. Use Amazon Athena to query CloudTrail logs stored in Amazon S3.
Answer: A
QUESTION 2
A company is storing data in Amazon S3 Glacier. The security engineer implemented a new vault lock policy for 10TB of data and called initiate-vault-lock operation 12 hours ago. The audit team identified a typo in the policy that is allowing unintended access to the vault.
What is the MOST cost-effective way to correct this?
A. Call the abort-vault-lock operation. Update the policy. Call the initiate-vault-lock operation again.
B. Copy the vault data to a new S3 bucket. Delete the vault. Create a new vault with the data.
C. Update the policy to keep the vault lock in place.
D. Update the policy. Call initiate-vault-lock operation again to apply the new policy.
Answer: A
Explanation/Reference:
Initiate the lock by attaching a vault lock policy to your vault, which sets the lock to an in-progress state and returns a lock ID. While in the in-progress state, you have 24 hours to validate your vault lock policy before the lock ID expires.
Use the lock ID to complete the lock process. If the vault lock policy doesn’t work as expected, you can abort the lock and restart from the beginning. For information on how to use the S3 Glacier API to lock a vault, see Locking a Vault by Using the Amazon S3 Glacier API.
QUESTION 3
A company wants to control access to its AWS resources by using identities and groups that are defined in its
existing Microsoft Active Directory.
What must the company create in its AWS account to map permissions for AWS services to Active Directory user attributes?
A. AWS IAM groups
B. AWS IAM users
C. AWS IAM roles
D. AWS IAM access keys
Answer: C
Explanation/Reference:
Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-connect-your-on-premises-active-directory-to-awsusingad-connector/
QUESTION 4
A company has contracted with a third party to audit several AWS accounts. To enable the audit, crossaccount
IAM roles have been created in each account targeted for audit. The Auditor is having trouble
accessing some of the accounts.
Which of the following may be causing this problem? (Choose three.)
A. The external ID used by the Auditor is missing or incorrect.
B. The Auditor is using the incorrect password.
C. The Auditor has not been granted sts:AssumeRole for the role in the destination account.
D. The Amazon EC2 role used by the Auditor must be set to the destination account role.
E. The secret key used by the Auditor is missing or incorrect.
F. The role ARN used by the Auditor is missing or incorrect.
Answer: C,EF
QUESTION 5
Compliance requirements state that all communications between company on-premises hosts and EC2
instances be encrypted in transit. Hosts use custom proprietary protocols for their communication, and EC2
instances need to be fronted by a load balancer for increased availability.
Which of the following solutions will meet these requirements?
A. Offload SSL termination onto an SSL listener on a Classic Load Balancer, and use a TCP connection between the load balancer and the EC2 instances.
B. Route all traffic through a TCP listener on a Classic Load Balancer, and terminate the TLS connection on the EC2 instances.
C. Create an HTTPS listener using an Application Load Balancer, and route all of the communication through that load balancer.
D. Offload SSL termination onto an SSL listener using an Application Load Balancer, and re-spawn and SSL connection between the load balancer and the EC2 instances.
Answer: B