hi everybody welcome back to boston you're watching thecube's coverage of reinforce 2022 last time we were here live was 2019. had a couple years of virtual merit bear is here she's with the office of the cso for aws merit welcome back to the cube good to see you thank you for coming on thank you so much it's good to be back um yes cso chief information security officer for folks who are acronym phobia phobic yeah okay so what do you do for the office of the is it ciso or sizzo anyway ah whatever is it sim or theme um i i work in three areas so i sit in aws security and i help us do security we're a shop that runs on aws i empathize with folks who are running shops it is process driven it takes hard work but we believe in certain mechanisms and muscle groups so you know i work on getting those better everything from how we do threat intelligence to how we guard rail employees and think about vending accounts and those kinds of things i also work in customer-facing interactions so when a cso wants to meet awssc so that's often me and then the third is product side so ensuring that everything we deliver not just security services are aligned with security best practices and expectations for our customers so i have to ask you right off the bat so we do a lot of spending surveys we have a partner etr i look at the data all the time and for some reason aws never shows up in the spending metrics why do you think that is maybe that talks to your strategy let's double click on that yeah so first of all um turn on guard duty get shield advanced for the you know accounts you need the 3k is relatively small and a large enterprise event like this doesn't mean don't spend on security there is a lot of goodness that we have to offer in ess external security services but i think one of the unique parts of aws is that we don't believe that security is something you should buy it's something that you get from us it's something that we do for you a lot of the time i mean this is the definition of the shared responsibility model right everything that you interact with on aws has been subject to the same rigorous standards and we aws security have umbrella arms around those but we also ensure that service teams own the security of their service so a lot of times when i'm talking to csos and i say security teams or sorry service teams own the security of their service they're curious like how do they not get frustrated and the answer is we put in a lot of mechanisms to allow those to go through so there's automation there are robots that resolve those trouble tickets you know like and we have emissaries we call them guardian champions that are embedded in service teams at any rate the point is i think it's really beautiful the way that customers who are you know enabling services in general benefit from the inheritances that they get and in some definition this is like the value proposition of cloud when we take care of those lower layers of the stack we're doing everything from the concrete floors guards and gates hvac you know in the case of something like aws bracket which is our quantum computing like we're talking about you know near vacuum uh environments like these are sometimes really intricate and beautiful ways that we take care of stuff that was otherwise manual and ugly and then we get up and we get really intricate there too so i gave a talk this morning about ddos protection um and all the stuff that we're doing where we can see because of our vantage point the volume and that leads us to be a leader in volumetric attack signatures for example manage rule sets like that costs you nothing turn on your dns firewall like there are ways that you just as a as an aws customer you inherit our rigorous standards and you also are able to benefit from the rigor with which we you know exact ourselves to really you're not trying to make it a huge business at least as part of your your portfolio it's just it's embedded it's there take advantage of it i want everyone to be secure and i will go to bad to say like i want you to do it and if money is a blocker let's talk about that because honestly we just want to do the right thing by customers and i want customers to use more of our services i genuinely believe that they are enablers we have pharma companies um that have helped enable you know personalized medicine and some of the copic vaccines we have you know like there are ways that this has mattered to people in really intimate ways um and then fun ways like formula one uh you know like there are things that allow us to do more and our customers to do more and security should be a way of life it's a way of breathing you don't wake up and decide that you're going to bolt it on one day okay so we heard cj moses keynote this morning i presume you were listening in uh we heard a lot about you know cool tools you know threat detection and devops and container security but he did explicitly talked about how aws is simplifying the life of the cso so what are you doing in that regard and what's that that's let's just leave it there for now i talk to c sales every day and i think um most of them have two main concerns one is how to get their organization to grow up like to understand what security looks like in a cloudy way um and that means that you know your login monitoring is going to be the forensics it's not going to be getting into the host that's on our side right and that's a luxury like i think there are elements of the cso job that have changed but that even if you know cj didn't explicitly call them out these are beauties things like um least privilege that you can accomplish using access analyzer and all these ways that inspector for example does network reachability and then all of these get piped to security hub and there's just ways that make it more accessible than ever to be a cso and to enable and embolden your people the second side is how csos are thinking about changing their organization so what are you reporting to the board um how are you thinking about hiring and um in the metrics side i would say you know being and i get a a lot of questions that are like how do we exhibit a culture of security and my answer is you do it you just start doing it like you make it so that your vps have to answer trouble tickets you may and and i don't mean literally like every trouble ticket but i mean they are 100 executives will say that they care about security but so what like you know set up your organization to be responsive to security and to um have to answer to them because it matters and and notice that because a non-decision is a decision and the other side is workforce right and i think um i see a lot of promise some of it unfulfilled in folks being hired to look different than traditional security folks and act different and maybe a first grade teacher or an architect or an artist and who don't consider themselves like particularly technical like the gorgeousness of cloud is that you can one teach yourself this i mean i didn't go to school for computer science like this is the kind of thing we all have to teach ourselves but also you can abstract on top of stuff so you're not writing code every day necessarily although if you are that's awesome and we love debbie folks but you know there's there's a lot of ways in which the machine of the security organization is suggesting i think cj was part to answer your question pointedly i think cj was trying to be really responsive to like all the stuff we're giving you all the goodness all the sprinkles on your cupcake not at all the organizational stuff that is kind of like you know the good stuff that we know we need to get into so i think so you're saying it's it's inherent it's inherently helping the cso uh her life his life become less complex and i feel like the cloud you said the customers are trying to become make their security more cloudy so i feel like the cloud has become the first line of defense now the cso your customer see so is the second line of defense maybe the audit is the third line what does that mean for the role of the the cso how is that they become a compliance officer what does that mean no no i think actually increasingly they are married or marriable so um when you're doing so for example if you are embracing [Music] ephemeral and immutable infrastructure then we're talking about using something like cloud formation or terraform to vend environments and you know being able to um use control tower and aws organizations to dictate um truisms through your environment you know like there are ways that you are basically in golden armies and you can come back to a known good state you can embrace that kind of cloudiness that allows you to get good to refine it to kill it and spin up a new infrastructure and that means though that like your i.t and your security will be woven in in a really um lovely way but in a way that contradicts certain like existing structures and i think one of the beauties is that your compliance can then wake up with it right your audit manager and your you know security hub and other folks that do compliance as code so you know inspector for example has a tooling that can without sending a single packet over the network do network reachability so they can tell whether you have an internet facing endpoint well that's a pci standard you know but that's also a security truism you shouldn't have internet facing endpoints you don't approve up you know like so these are i think these can go in hand in hand there are certainly i i don't know that i totally disregard like a defense in-depth notion but i don't think that it's linear in that way i think it's like circular that we hope that these mechanisms work together that we also know that they should speak to each other and and be augmented and aware of one another so an example of this would be that we don't just do perimeter detection we do identity-based fine-grained controls and that those are listening to and reasoned about using tooling that we can do using security yeah we heard a lot about reasoning as well in the keynote but i want to ask about zero trust like aws i think resisted using that term you know the industry was a buzzword before the pandemic it's probably more buzzy now although in a way it's a mandate um depending on how you look at it so i mean you anything that's not explicitly allowed is denied in your world and you have tools and i mean that's a definition if it's a die that overrides if it's another it's a deny call that will override and allow yeah that's true although anyway finish your question yeah yeah so so my it's like if there's if there's doubt there's no doubt it seems in your world but but but you have a lot of capabilities seems to me that this is how you you apply aws internal security and bring that to your customers do customers talk to you about zero trust are they trying to implement zero trust what's the best way for them to do that when they don't have that they have a lack of talent they don't have the skill sets uh that it and the knowledge that aws has what are you hearing from customers in that regard yeah that's a really um nuanced phrasing which i appreciate because i think so i think you're right zero trust is a term that like means everything and nothing i mean like this this notebook is zero trust like no internet comes in or out of it like congratulations you also can't do business on it right um i do a lot of business online you know what i mean like you can't uh transact something to other folks and if i lose it i'm screwed yeah exactly i usually have a water bottle or something that's even more inanimate than your notebook um but i guess my point is we i don't think that the term zero trust is a truism i think it's a conceptual framework right and the idea is that we want to make it so that someone's position in the network is agnostic to their permissioning so whereas in the olden days like a decade ago um we might have assumed that when you're in the perimeter you just accept everything um that's no longer the right way to think about it and frankly like covid and work from home may have accelerated this but this was ripe to be accelerated anyway um what we are thinking about is both like you said under the network so like the network layer are we talking about machine to machine are we talking about like um you know every api call goes over the open internet with no inherent assurances human to app or it's protected by sig v4 you know like there is an inherent zero trust case that we have always built this goes back to a jeff bezos mandate from 2002 that everything be an api call that is again this kind of like building security into it when we say security is job zero it not only reflects the fact that like when you build a terraform or a cloud formation template you better have permission things appropriately or try to but also that like there is no cloud without security considerations you don't get to just bolt something on after the fact so that being said now that we embrace that and we can reason about it and we can use tools like access analyzer you know we're also talking about zero trust in that like i said augmentation identity centric fine grained controls so an example of this would be a vpc endpoint policy where it is a perm the perimeter is dead long live the perimeter right you'll have your traditional perimeter your vpc or your vpn um augmented by and aware of the fine-grained identity-centric ones which you can also reason about prune down continuously monitor and so on and that'll also help you with your logging and monitoring because you know what your ingress and egress points are how concerned should people be with quantum messing up all the encryption algos oh it's stopping created right okay so but we heard about this in the keynote right so is it just a quantum so far off by the time we get there is it like a y2k you're probably not old enough to remember y2k but y2k moment right i mean i can't take you anywhere what should we um how should we be thinking about quantum in the context of security and sure yeah i mean i think we should be thinking about quantum and a lot of dimensions as operationally interesting and how we can leverage i think we should be thinking about it in the security future for right now aes256 is something that is not broken so we shouldn't try to fix it yeah cool encrypt all the things you can do it natively you know like i love talking about quantum but it's more of an aspirational and also like we can be doing high power compute to solve problems you know but like for it to get to a security uh potentially uh vulnerable state or like something that we should worry about is a bit off yeah and show me an application that can yeah and i mean and i think at that point we're talking about homomorphic improvements about another thing i kind of feel the same way is that you know there's a lot of hype around it a lot of ibm talks about a lot you guys talked about in your keynote today and when i really talk to people who understand this stuff it seems like it's a long long way off i don't think it's a long long way off but everything is dog years in tech world but um but for today you know like for today encrypt yourself we will always keep our encryption up to standard and you know that will be for now like the the industry grade standard that folks i mean like i i have i have never heard of a case where someone had their kms keys broken into i um i always ask like awesome security people this question did you like how did you get into this did you have like did you have a favorite superhero as a kid that was going to save the world i um was always the kid who probably would have picked up a book about the cia and i like find this and i don't remember who i was before i was a security person um but i also think that as a woman um from an american indian family walking through the world i think about the relationship between dynamics with the government and companies and individuals and how we want to construct those and the need for voices that are observant of the ways that those interplay and i always saw this as a field where we can do a lot of good yeah amazing merritt thanks so much for coming on thecube great guest john said you would be really appreciate your time of course all right keep it ready you're very welcome keep it right there this is dave vellante for the cube we'll be right back at aws reinforced 2022 from boston keep right there [Music]