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Difficulty: EasyNetwork and Infrastructure Security

A municipal library is hosting its public book catalog on an Amazon EC2 instance. The library's IT administrator is configuring a security group to secure this instance. Which two statements describe the behavior or characteristics of AWS security groups?

  1. They are stateful, meaning that return traffic for allowed inbound requests is automatically permitted.Answer
  2. They deny all inbound traffic by default when a new security group is created, requiring explicit allow rules.Answer
  3. C
    They are stateless, meaning that you must configure a matching outbound rule to allow return traffic.
  4. D
    They operate at the subnet level of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to secure all resources within that subnet.
  5. E
    They automatically scan the operating system of the EC2 instance for software vulnerabilities.

Answer

The correct statements are that security groups are stateful, automatically allowing return traffic for allowed inbound requests, and that newly created security groups deny all inbound traffic by default.
Security groups are stateful firewalls that automatically allow outbound response traffic for any permitted inbound connection. When created, they deny all incoming connections by default until custom rules are added to allow traffic.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the target resource context.
The scenario requires securing an Amazon EC2 instance using a security group.
This defines the resource scope for application of the firewall rules.
2
Determine the state behavior of security groups.
Security groups track connections and are stateful, meaning allowed traffic automatically allows its corresponding return traffic.
This establishes stateful traffic rules.
3
Evaluate the default configuration.
New security groups default to blocking all inbound traffic while allowing all outbound traffic.
This defines standard baseline security posture.

Key Concept

AWS security groups act as virtual firewalls at the instance level, operating statefully with default settings that deny all inbound traffic.
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Topics

Network and Infrastructure Security

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