AWS Open Sources Security Tools

At the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America, Amazon Web Services (AWS) made not one, but two, important open source security announcements. First, the company is open sourcing its Cedar policy language and authorization engine. This tool allows developers to set intricate policy permissions within their applications that are separate from their application logic. The other, Snapchange, is an experimental venture into the potential of the Linux’s kernel’s built-in virtual machine program, KVM, for snapshot fuzzing.

Cedar is already used by the Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP), and AWS Verified Access managed services. It’s both a language and a software development kit (SDK) for building and enforcing application authorization policies. With Cedar, programmers can control access to resources such as data, compute nodes in a cluster, or workflow automation components, AWS claims it’s very flexible, and developers can specify fine-grained permissions with it.