AWS S3 Certificate Management for Secure Static Hosting

AWS S3 Certificate Management for Secure Static Hosting is a crucial aspect of ensuring your website's security and credibility. This is because SSL/TLS certificates are required for HTTPS connections, which are necessary for secure static hosting.

To obtain an SSL/TLS certificate for your S3 bucket, you can use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), which is a secure, reliable, and easy-to-use service for managing SSL/TLS certificates.

ACM supports several types of certificates, including public, private, and imported certificates, and it can also be used to obtain certificates from trusted third-party certificate authorities.

For static websites hosted on S3, you can use a certificate that is automatically issued by ACM, known as an ACM-issued certificate, which eliminates the need for manual certificate management.

To set up an SSL certificate, you'll need to create a certificate using AWS Certificate Manager. CloudFront recognizes certificates issued from the us-east-1 region, so make sure to change your region to us-east-1 or North Virginia.

Recommended read: Aws S3 Cross Region Replication

You'll then need to request a public certificate, filling in your domain name, and choosing the DNS validation method and key algorithm. The default RSA 2048 key type is widely used, so you can stick with that.

AWS will need to verify that you own the domain, so you'll need to validate this using DNS records. To do this, click on the certificate's ID and under "Domains", click "Create records in Route 53". This will create DNS records to link your domain to the certificate.

Here are the steps to request a certificate:

It may take around 30 minutes for AWS to issue the certificate and create the DNS records.

Certificate-based authentication is a secure way to authenticate S3 clients, especially for automated applications. This method uses X.509 / TLS certificates to verify the authenticity of the client.

Certificates are widely supported across SDKs and programming languages, making it a convenient choice for S3 clients. They also provide a standard way to prove the identity of a service on the internet.

Certificate-based authentication requires a TLS connection, which ensures that S3 access credentials cannot be leaked over an insecure network connection. This is a significant advantage over other authentication methods.

Here are some benefits of certificate-based authentication:

Kubernetes provides a certificate API for requesting and issuing certificates to pods, making it easy to provision applications with certificates. This allows applications to use their certificates to authenticate to MinIO as their S3 persistence layer.

You'll need to create a CloudFront distribution to connect your DNS record, SSL certificate, and S3 bucket. CloudFront can handle SSL connections with a custom domain, but S3 cannot.

To create a CloudFront distribution, you'll need to specify the origin domain name, which is the source of the content for this distribution. Select the S3 bucket that corresponds to your custom domain.

You'll also want to restrict bucket access to ensure that all public traffic is routed through CloudFront. This will guarantee that pages always display at the custom domain name.

Recommended read: Cloudfront Aws S3

Viewer Protocol Policy should be set to Redirect HTTP to HTTPS to force all connections to use SSL. This is a good practice to ensure a secure connection.

Allowed HTTP Methods should be specified according to your site's requirements. For most passive content sites, the default GET, HEAD setting is sufficient.

Compress Objects Automatically should be enabled to reduce bandwidth. Gzip compression is a great way to save bandwidth.

Alternate Domain Names is a crucial setting. You must enter your custom domain name (e.g. mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com) here. When a client request hits Route53 and gets routed to CloudFront, CF will verify that the requested domain is in its domain name list and that the certificate matches that domain.

Here's a summary of the key settings:

To set up an AWS S3 certificate, you'll need to follow these steps.

First, register your domain name using Route 53 or point your name servers to AWS.

Generating an SSL certificate for your domain is a crucial step in the process.

You'll also need to create an S3 bucket with the same name as you want your domain to show.

Create a CloudFront Distribution that points to the S3 bucket with the same name you want your traffic routed to, using the HTTP link.

To complete the setup, create an A record in Route 53 that points to the CloudFront Distribution previously created.

Here are the steps in a concise list: