This morning Amazon announced that Amazon Web Services achieved PCI-DSS 2.0 Validated Service Provider compliance. This is both a very big deal, and no big deal at all. Here’s why:

  • This certification means that the AWS services within scope (EC2, EBS, S3, and VPC – most of the important bits) passed an annual assessment by a QSA and undergo quarterly scans by an ASV. This means that Amazon’s infrastructure is certified to support payment system applications and services (anything that takes a credit card). This is a big deal, because there is no longer any question (until something changes) that you are allowed to deploy a payment system/application on AWS.
  • Just because AWS is certified doesn’t mean you are. You still need to deploy a PCI compliant application/service and anything on AWS is still within your assessment scope. But any assessment you pay for will be limited to your installation – the back-end AWS components are covered by Amazon’s assessment, and your assessor won’t need to pound through all of Amazon to certify your environment deployed on AWS. Chris Hoff presciently wrote about this the night before Amazon’s announcement. Anything on your side that’s in scope (containing PAN data) is still in scope and needs to be assessed, but there are no longer any questions that you can deploy into AWS (another big deal).
  • The “big whoop” part? As we said, your systems are still in scope even if you deploy on AWS, and still need to be assessed (and compliant).
  • The open question? PCI-DSS 2.0 doesn’t address multi-tenancy concerns (which Amazon actually notes in their release). This is a huge political battleground behind the scenes (ask anyone in the virtualization SIG), and just because AWS is certified as a service provider doesn’t mean all cloud IaaS providers will be, nor that there won’t be a multi-tenancy failure on AWS leading to exposure of cardholder data. Compliance (still) != security.

For a practical example: you can store PAN data on S3, but it still needs to be encrypted in accordance with PCI-DSS requirements. Amazon doesn’t do this for you – it’s something you need to implement yourself; including key management, rotation, logging, etc. If you deploy a server instance in EC2 it still needs to undergo ASV scans and meet all other requirements, and will be assessed by your QSA (if in scope).

What this certification really does is eliminate any doubts that you are allowed to deploy an in-scope PCI system on AWS, and reduces your assessment scope to only your in-scope bits on AWS, not the entire service. This is a big deal, but your organization’s assessment scope isn’t necessarily reduced, as it might be when you move to something like a tokenization service where you reduce your handling of PAN data.

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