AWS Security Specialty Certification — A Preparation Guide

I’m happy to share that I have successfully passed the AWS Certified Security Specialty examination last Wednesday on 23rd December 2020.

With that, I would like to document and share my preparation journey to get me there.

Building on my previous associate-level certifications, the entire studying process for this certification took me a total of 12 days (11th December — 23rd December), with approx. 4 hours dedicated to studying each day.

Post Exam Review:

With reference to the previous AWS examinations I have taken (Cloud Practitioner and Associate), I found it easier to study for the Security Specialty certification due to its targeted emphasis on a few AWS services and security features.

List of AWS Services to master for the examination:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)***
• AWS Key Management System (KMS)***
• AWS S3 (Bucket Policies, Object Access Control List and interactions with IAM)
• Different types of S3 Encryption (S3-KMS / CMK …)
• AWS Organizations (Setting up Organizations and SCP…)
• AWS CloudHSM
• AWS Shield + WAF (DDOS Protection + Common Cyber Security Vulnerabilities)
• AWS GuardDuty
• AWS Inspector
• AWS Artifact
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Macie (For Personal-identifiable Information Protection)
• AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Parameter Store (For storing environment variables / database credentials)
• AWS CloudWatch + AWS CloudTrail + Lambda (To create automated security monitoring systems)
• TLS/SSL Certification / Configuration for CloudFront / ELB / EC2

My recommended studying route would be as follows:

1. Watch the A-Cloud-Guru (ACG) video course on the AWS Security certification front-to-back. Like all ACG videos, this 14-hour course provides a good high-level overview on the certification curriculum. The video lectures are rather engaging and to-the-point. Do note however, by relying solely on this course is not sufficient to pass the exam.
2. Watch this keynote presentation from AWS re:Inforce 2019 (AWS Security Conference). This 40-min presentation provides a strong foundation to the mental model of AWS Security and security design patterns.

I have compiled some of my learning resources, notes and exam guide in this Notion page over here.

I hope you will find the above useful in your journey — feel free to reach out for any further information.