AWS KMS rotate keys can be automated with this step-by-step guide by our experts.

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Let’s take a look at how our AWS Support Team helped our customers with learning more AWS KMS rotate keys.

All About AWS KMS rotate keys

AWS Key Management Service helps us create and control keys of cryptography operations. Furthermore, it offers key generation, management, and storage facilities. Additionally, it also comes with an auditing solution that comes in handy in encrypting or digitally signing data in our own applications. In fact, we can also control data encryptions across AWS services with AWS KMS.

Extensive reuse of encryption keys is heavily discouraged in cryptography. This is overcome in AWS KMS by creating new KMS keys and changing the applications or aliases in order to use new KMS keys. Alternatively, we can automate key rotation for an already existing KMS key.

Automatic key rotations of a KMS key involve AWS KMS to generate new cryptographic material for KMS keys each year. Moreover, it saves the previous versions of the cryptographic material to help us decrypt any data as and when we require it. In fact, AWS KMS saves rotated key material as long as the KMS key exists. To make things easier, we can track the KMS key material rotation via AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch.

Benefits offered by rotating AWS KMS keys

• The properties of the KMS key like key ARN, key ID, and so on remain intact and do not change due to key rotation.
• We do not have to change aliases or applications that refer to the KMS key’s key ARN or key ID.
• It does not cause any issues in the usage of the KMS key in any other AWS service.
• We do not have to schedule the update each year once we enable key rotation. It occurs automatically.

How to enable automatic KMS key rotation

1. First, sign in to the AWS management console and open the AWS KMS console.
2. Then, we can change the AWS Region by navigating to the Region selector option.
3. Next, head to Customer managed keys in the navigation pane and select the key ID or alias of a KMS key.
4. After that, select the Key Rotation tab and choose the checkbox next to Automatically rotate this KMS key every year.

Our Support Team would like to point out that we won’t be able to automate key rotation if the KMS key is in a disabled or pending deletion stage.

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Conclusion

In a nutshell, our skilled AWS Support Engineers at Bobcares took us through AWS KMS and its benefits. We also learned how to enable automatic AWS KMS key rotation via the AWS KM console.