EMR clusters should use in-transit encryption

Severity	Exploitability	Providers	Categories
HIGH	LOW	AWS	DATA, NETWORK, PERMISSION

Description

AWS Elastic MapReduce (EMR) is a managed cluster platform that assists running big data frameworks to process and analyze data.

Enabling in-transit encryption helps protect data when it is moving from one location to another.

Impact

Potential data exposure	Visible in logs	User interaction required	Privileges required
True	False	False	True

Not encrypting data in-transit could lead to data leak in case of an attack.

Remediation guidelines

For AWS EMR version 4.8.0 or later, update the security configuration attached to the EMR cluster so that EncryptionConfiguration.EnableInTransitEncryption is set to true. See this AWS documentation page for configuration examples. For earlier versions, you will need to manually create a security configuration and then specify your S3 data encryption. The steps are described in the following pages:

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-create-security-configuration.html
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/secure-amazon-emr-with-encryption/

Please note that you may encounter service disruption after you reconfigure your cluster as explained in this section

References

• Encrypt data at rest and in transit

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