Pass SCS-C03 Exam Guide

AWS Config is the AWS service designed to continuously evaluate resource configurations against defined rules. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, AWS Config managed rules exist specifically to check database encryption, public accessibility, deletion protection, and log exports for Amazon RDS and Aurora.

AWS Config provides a real-time compliance timeline and displays the compliance state of each resource against each rule at any point in time. This granular visibility is required to assess ongoing compliance with security policies.

Audit Manager generates reports but does not provide continuous compliance monitoring. Security Hub aggregates findings but does not track configuration drift. EventBridge and Lambda introduce unnecessary complexity.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Managed Rules for RDS

AWS Continuous Compliance Monitoring

Comprehensive and Detailed 100to 150 words of Explanation From AWS Certified Security – Specialty topics:

IAM Roles Anywhere is built for workloads that run outside AWS and need temporary AWS credentials through IAM roles. It uses X.509 certificates, a trust anchor, profiles, and role trust policies so external servers, containers, or applications can obtain short-lived credentials without IAM user access keys. AWS also provides a credential helper that external applications can use with SDK credential_process integration. IAM Identity Center is primarily for workforce access and managed applications, not non-human workload authentication. AWS Verified Access controls access to applications, not AWS role assumption for external workloads. Generic SAML federation can work for identity providers, but this question asks for an external application replacing IAM user credentials, which is exactly the IAM Roles Anywhere use case.

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To enforce encryption in transit to Aurora, you must require clients to useTLS/SSLwhen connecting to the database. Aurora (depending on engine flavor) supports a parameter that enforces secure transport by rejecting non-TLS connections. Setting the DB (cluster/instance) parameter such asrequire_secure_transporttoONforces clients to negotiate SSL/TLS; otherwise the server refuses the connection, ensuring all data in transit is encrypted. This directly enforces the compliance requirement at the database endpoint itself, independent of client behavior.

Kerberos authentication (Option B) provides centralized authentication and can be useful for IAM/AD integration, but it does not by itself guarantee that the network session is encrypted. Option C is incorrect because Aurora/RDS usesRDS-provided certificatesfor TLS; you don’t attach ACM certificates to Aurora the way you would for ALB/CloudFront. Option D is not the right enforcement mechanism: RDS Proxy can help with connection pooling and IAM auth patterns, but it does not inherently force all client-to-proxy or proxy-to-db connections to be encrypted in the way a DB parameter enforcement does (and you’d still need to ensure clients use TLS). Therefore, enabling the parameter that requires secure transport is the correct solution.