Which of the following statements would be the best choice to put your client’s mind at rest?

As AWS grows, most of your clients’ main concerns seem to be about security, especially when all of their competitors also seem to be using AWS. One of your clients asks you whether having a competitor who hosts their EC2 instances on the same physical host would make it easier for the competitor to hack into the client’s data.

Which of the following statements would be the best choice to put your client’s mind at rest?
A .  Different instances running on the same physical machine are isolated from each other via a 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256).
B .  Different instances running on the same physical machine are isolated from each other via the Xen hypervisor and via a 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256).
C .  Different instances running on the same physical machine are isolated from each other via the Xen hypervisor.
D .  Different instances running on the same physical machine are isolated from each other via IAM permissions.

View Answer

Answer: C

Explanation:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a key component in Amazon’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), providing resizable computing capacity using server instances in AWS’s data centers. Amazon EC2 is designed to make web-scale computing easier by enabling you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

You create and launch instances, which are collections of platform hardware and software.

Different instances running on the same physical machine are isolated from each other via the Xen hypervisor.

Amazon is active in the Xen community, which provides awareness of the latest developments. In addition, the AWS firewall resides within the hypervisor layer, between the physical network interface and the instance’s virtual interface. All packets must pass through this layer, thus an instance’s neighbors have no more access to that instance than any other host on the Internet and can be treated as if they are on separate physical hosts. The physical RAM is separated using similar mechanisms.

Reference: http://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/AWS%20Security%20Whitepaper.pdf