Today, I’m happy to announce the general availability of network activity events for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints in AWS CloudTrail. This feature helps you to record and monitor AWS API activity traversing your VPC endpoints, helping you strengthen your data perimeter and implement better detective controls.
Previously, it was hard to detect potential data exfiltration attempts and unauthorized access to the resources within your network through VPC endpoints. While VPC endpoint policies could be configured to prevent access from external accounts, there was no built-in mechanism to log denied actions or detect when external credentials were used at a VPC endpoint. This often required you to build custom solutions to inspect and analyze TLS traffic, which could be operationally costly and negate the benefits of encrypted communications.
With this new capability, you can now opt in to log all AWS API activity passing through your VPC endpoints. CloudTrail records these events as a new event type called network activity events, which capture both control plane and data plane actions passing through a VPC endpoint.
Network activity events in CloudTrail provide several key benefits:
- Comprehensive visibility – Log all API activity traversing VPC endpoints, regardless of the AWS account initiating the action.
- External credential detection – Identify when credentials from outside your organization are accessing your VPC endpoint.
- Data exfiltration prevention – Detect and investigate potential unauthorized data movement attempts.
- Enhanced security monitoring – Gain insights into all AWS API activity at your VPC endpoints without the need to decrypt TLS traffic.
- Visibility for regulatory compliance – Improve your ability to meet regulatory requirements by tracking all API activity passing through.
Getting started with network activity events for VPC endpoint logging
To enable network activity events, I go to the AWS CloudTrail console and choose Trails in the navigation pane. I choose Create trail to create a new one. I enter a name in the Trail name field and choose an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket to store the event logs. When I create a trail in CloudTrail, I can specify an existing Amazon S3 bucket or create a new bucket to store my trail’s event logs.
If you set Log file SSE-KMS encryption to Enabled, you have two options: Choose New to create a new AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key or choose Existing to choose an existing KMS key. If you chose New, you need to type an alias in the AWS KMS alias field. CloudTrail encrypts your log files with this KMS key and adds the policy for you. The KMS key and Amazon S3 must be in the same AWS Region. For this example, I use an existing KMS key. I enter the alias in the AWS KMS alias field and leave the rest as default for this demo. I choose Next for the next step.
In the Choose log events step, I choose Network activity events under Events. I choose the event source from the list of AWS services, such as cloudtrail.amazonaws.com, ec2.amazonaws.com, kms.amazonaws.com, s3.amazonaws.com, and secretsmanager.amazonaws.com. I add two network activity event sources for this demo. For the first source, I select ec2.amazonaws.com option. For Log selector template, I can use templates for common use cases or create fine-grained filters for specific scenarios. For example, to log all API activities traversing the VPC endpoint, I can choose the Log all events template. I choose Log network activity access denied events template to log only access denied events. Optionally, I can enter a name in the Selector name field to identify the log selector template, such as Include network activity events for Amazon EC2.
As a second example, I choose Custom to create custom filters on multiple fields, such as eventName and vpcEndpointId. I can specify specific VPC endpoint IDs or filter the results to include only the VPC endpoints that match specific criteria. For Advanced event selectors, I choose vpcEndpointId from the Field dropdown, choose equals as Operator, and enter the VPC endpoint ID. When I expand the JSON view, I can see my event selectors as a JSON block. I choose Next and after reviewing the selections, I choose Create trail.
After it’s configured, CloudTrail will begin logging network activity events for my VPC endpoints, helping me analyze and act on this data. To analyze AWS CloudTrail network activity events, you can use the CloudTrail console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and AWS SDK to retrieve relevant logs. You can also use CloudTrail Lake to capture, store and analyze your network activity events. If you are using Trails, you can use Amazon Athena to query and filter these events based on specific criteria. Regular analysis of these events can help you maintain security, comply with regulations, and optimize your network infrastructure in AWS.
Now available
CloudTrail network activity events for VPC endpoint logging provide you with a powerful tool to enhance your security posture, detect potential threats, and gain deeper insights into your VPC network traffic. This feature addresses your critical needs for comprehensive visibility and control over your AWS environments.
Network activity events for VPC endpoints are available in all commercial AWS Regions.
For pricing information, visit AWS CloudTrail pricing.
To get started with CloudTrail network activity events, visit AWS CloudTrail. For more information on CloudTrail and its features, refer to the AWS CloudTrail documentation.