Chris Farris

As has been my tradition the last few years, I prep for re:Invent by reviewing all the interesting announcements that happen in the weeks leading up to the event. This gives me a chance to keep an eye out for sessions and chalktalks related to things I care about, and a chance to corner an SA or product manager at the AWS Booth and go like this:

This year I’ll be attending AWS as a Security Hero. The good news for all 845,000 attendees is that I don’t have to wear tights. Instead I’ll be hanging out in the Heroes lounge with the other Heroes and Community Builders (hopefully sipping mimosas during the keynotes).

I deliberately published an Access Key and Secrets. Here’s what happened.

There is no canonical way to use Terraform in CodeBuild, with CodePipeline as the method to review plans before applying them. This post defines a Cloudformation template and the buildspec files needed to create a CodePipeline that runs terraform plan, allows a human to review it, then runs terraform apply.

With ChatGPT being all the rage, I decided to see if she (it?) could write my next blog post for me. I’d already written all the Steampipe queries and determined the security value behind the blog post. I just didn’t feel like writing it.

The post’s topic was on enumerating your network-plane cloud perimeter.

My third annual pre:Invent roundup is posted over on Steampipe’s blog. You can also check out 2021 and 2020 if you’re so inclined.

Back in 2018, I wrote a semi-serious post on what you as a security practitioner should be looking for as it relates to re:Invent announcements.

There were a few hot-takes that didn’t warrant mention on my work post, so I’ll include them here for your general amusement.

It’s pre:Invent 2022, the time of year AWS releases a bunch of new products and features that aren’t big enough to make it on the keynote state of re:Invent. One of my long-awaited features was released last night: CloudFormation support for AWS Organizations! Before this release, the management of Service Control Policies, Organizational Units, and AWS Accounts was either artisanal or via third-party tools like org-formation. I can finally manage my AWS Organization using the same IaC as I manage the accounts in that organization.

I feel like the phrase “disruptor” is an overused, Valley-Bro trope. However I can’t think of a better phrase to describe Tailscale, and what it will do to the enterprise firewall and VPN market for the security 99%.

My latest post at Steampipe.io is Enrich Splunk events with Steampipe . This was a fun one to write because it was a culmination on my recent IR work at BSides Atlanta and BSides Augusta.

I’ve written some crazy contraptions to get this stuff into Splunk, and I’ve got to say, Steampipe made it super easy.

I got a bug to tell everyone about the sessions I’m looking forward to at re:Invent this year. Check it out.

At BSides Atlanta today I gave a talk on how to handle an incident in AWS. The talk and this post is intended to help those already familiar with the principles of Incident Response to understand what to do when the incident involves the AWS Control Plane. You can find the Slides here.