AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question
Your organization ingests 500 TB of telemetry data every day into an Amazon S3 bucket. The ingestion micro-services already send PutObject requests with the header x-amz-server-side-encryption: aws:kms, which uses the bucket's default AWS-managed key.
A new compliance mandate states that:
The encryption key material must reside in a single-tenant FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security module (HSM) that the company fully controls within the same AWS Region.
Application code and existing API calls must not be modified.
Which approach meets the new requirement for encryption at rest with the least disruption?
Create an AWS CloudHSM cluster and a KMS custom key store backed by that cluster, generate a symmetric customer-managed key in the store, and configure the S3 bucket to use this key for SSE-KMS.
Enable bucket-level default encryption with SSE-S3 (AES-256) and enforce its use through a bucket policy.
Encrypt objects client-side with the AWS Encryption SDK and upload them to S3 without any server-side encryption header.
Switch to server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) by including the x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-key header in each PutObject call.
A KMS custom key store backed by an AWS CloudHSM cluster gives the company sole tenancy over FIPS 140-2 Level 3 HSMs while still exposing the standard KMS APIs. After creating a symmetric customer-managed KMS key in that custom key store and configuring the bucket's default encryption (or the header value) to reference that key, Amazon S3 continues to perform server-side encryption (SSE-KMS) without any change to the existing PutObject calls.
SSE-S3 keeps the current API but relies on multi-tenant AWS-managed keys, so it fails the single-tenant requirement. SSE-C would satisfy key ownership but forces every request to transmit the key and alters the ingestion pipeline. Client-side encryption requires code changes and only provides protection before the object reaches S3, so it does not meet the server-side encryption mandate.
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What is AWS CloudHSM, and how does it ensure sole tenancy for encryption keys?
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AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02
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