Best Practices for Securing AWS Payment Cryptography Deployments

This article outlines best practices for securing AWS Payment Cryptography deployments through layered security controls.

• Use separate AWS accounts for different applications to provide natural security boundaries and reduce blast radius
• Isolate applications in private VPCs without public internet access and separate VPCs for key management operations
• Apply least-privilege IAM roles granting only required actions to specific principals and keys
• Configure security groups as stateful firewalls allowing traffic only from specific sources and destinations
• Use VPC endpoints with AWS PrivateLink to secure data plane and control plane communications
• Implement temporary elevated access through Systems Manager Session Manager for key administration tasks
• Enable multi-party approval for importing root keys to reduce key exfiltration risk
• Leverage Service Control Policies to centrally manage maximum permissions across the organization

By implementing these layered security controls separating data plane and control plane access, organizations can reduce operational risk and support PCI compliance objectives for payment processing.