Protecting Critical Business Files: How to Ensure Data Integrity in Amazon S3 Bucket
Question
A Financial firm is using an Amazon S3 bucket to store its critical business files.
Users upload these files from on-premises locations to individual folders in the Amazon S3 bucket.
Security Head requested you to ensure all files uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket are not corrupted during transit. What can be done to ensure this request is met?
Answers
Explanations
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.Correct Answer: A.
Content-MD5 header is an optional header in the Amazon S3 REST requests, which can be used to check the integrity of the data and ensure data is not corrupt during transit.
When data is uploaded using PutObject having Content-MD5 as a request header, Amazon S3 checks the data against the Content-MD5 value.
If the value is not matched, an error is generated.
Option B is incorrect as the header x-amz-content-sha256 provides a hash of the payload used for authentication in the case of the signature version4
This header is not used for checking integrity of the data.
Option C is incorrect as Content-type consists of the content type of the resources and is not used for checking integrity of the data.
Option D is incorrect as the header x-amz-security-token is used for requests which use Amazon DevPay and temporary security credentials.
This header is not used for checking integrity of the data.
For more information on integrity check with Amazon S3, refer to the following URLs,
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/RESTCommonRequestHeaders.html https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/data-integrity-s3/The correct answer to this question is A. While uploading files with PutObject API, pass the Content-MD5 value as a request header.
Explanation:
When data is transmitted over a network, it is possible that it may be corrupted or modified during transit. This can result in data integrity issues, which can have serious consequences for businesses, especially financial firms that deal with critical business data. To ensure data integrity, AWS provides various mechanisms, such as SSL/TLS encryption, AWS KMS encryption, and checksum validation.
In this case, the security head requested a way to ensure that all files uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket are not corrupted during transit. To achieve this, the Content-MD5 value can be used. The Content-MD5 value is a checksum value that is calculated based on the content of the file. This value is unique to the file and is used to ensure that the file has not been corrupted or modified during transit.
The PutObject API is used to upload objects to an S3 bucket. The API allows you to pass various request headers to control the behavior of the upload. To ensure that the uploaded files are not corrupted, the Content-MD5 value can be passed as a request header. This value can be calculated on the client-side and passed as a Base64-encoded string in the Content-MD5 request header.
Option B is incorrect because the x-amz-content-sha256 header is used to provide the SHA-256 checksum of the object being uploaded. This header is used to ensure that the uploaded object has not been tampered with during transit.
Option C is incorrect because the Content-Type header is used to specify the type of data being uploaded. This header is not used to ensure data integrity.
Option D is incorrect because the x-amz-security-token header is used to provide temporary security credentials when uploading objects to an S3 bucket. This header is not used to ensure data integrity.
In summary, to ensure that all files uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket are not corrupted during transit, the Content-MD5 value can be passed as a request header while uploading files with the PutObject API.
