Design and Implementation of a Secure AWS-EC2 Integrated System Using AES-Based Encryption

Abstract This paper provides the design and implementation of a secure file management system that will be hosted in AWS EC2 instances and will include AES-based file encryption, robust authentication, role-based access control and the use of encrypted metadata to guard sensitive files stored on the EBS volume of the instance. Despite the AWS EC2 being a secure and reliable virtualized infrastructure, the current cloud implementation is threatened by a growing number of credential theft, inadequately hardened server, poorly configured security groups, and unauthorized access attempts through the Internet. Conventional EC2-based file systems, operating at least exclusively on Linux file permissions or EBS-level encryption, are not capable of ensuring file content security in case of acquisition of shell access, privilege escalation, or application-level credentials compromise. The suggested system also makes sure that all files stored within the EC2 set up are encrypted using AES-256-GCM, so that, in the case of attackers, system administrators or cloud intruders, they are not able to access plaintext files. Confidentiality and inference attacks are also further reinforced with JWT-based authentication, restrictions on instance access due to IAM and encrypted metadata. Through experimental analysis, it has low encryption and decryption latency, high integrity protection, and dependable performance in a standard EC2 workload. This is a highly secure, lightweight and cloud-ready file management architecture for applications that are deployed directly on EC2 instances. Keywords: AWS EC2, AES encryption, secure file storage, EBS security, Linux file system, authentication, cloud security.