Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Network Services

A financial services company hosts a web application on Amazon EC2 instances inside a public subnet of an Amazon VPC. The security team detects a flood of malicious traffic coming from a specific external IP address range: 198.51.100.0/22198.51.100.0/22. To protect the application, the team must immediately block all incoming traffic from this specific IP range before it reaches the EC2 instances.

Which AWS network security feature should the company configure to meet this requirement?

  1. Network Access Control List (Network ACL)Answer
  2. B
    Security Group
  3. C
    AWS Support ticket requesting IP blocking
  4. D
    AWS Transit Gateway

Answer

Network Access Control List (Network ACL)
A Network Access Control List (Network ACL) acts as a stateless firewall at the subnet boundary. Because it supports both allow and deny rules, it can be configured to block all inbound traffic from the specified IP address range before the traffic can reach any resources in the subnet.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the level of network control required.
The requirement is to block traffic at the subnet boundary before it reaches any EC2 instances.
This narrows down the choice to subnet-level network features rather than instance-level or global routing services.
2
Determine the rule capability needed.
The solution requires an explicit deny rule to block a specific IP range (198.51.100.0/22198.51.100.0/22).
Security Groups only support allow rules, whereas Network ACLs support both allow and deny rules.
3
Select the correct AWS network security feature.
A Network ACL is the correct tool since it operates at the subnet boundary and allows creating explicit inbound deny rules.
This satisfies both the boundary and functional requirements of the scenario.

Key Concept

Network ACLs act as stateless firewalls at the subnet level and support explicit allow and deny rules, whereas Security Groups act as stateful firewalls at the instance level and only support allow rules.
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