Securing your application

In the previous section, we talked about some best practices when it comes to connecting to and calling Athena. In this section, we're going to touch a little bit more on that point, but with a focus on security, and then focus on some other mechanisms for using Athena in the safest way possible. In Chapter 5, Securing Your Data, we discussed the concepts of the attack surface and blast radius, two metrics by which you can measure how safe your application is, both in terms of preventing a bad actor from gaining access and then minimizing the impact in the event that they do gain access. Some of the stuff we are going to cover is not necessarily specific to an Athena-based application, but it is still very valuable information to keep in mind.

Credential management

Firstly, we're going to take a look at credentials, the entry point for secure communication with AWS. We're going to focus on two specific aspects of it – life cycle...