In this post we’re going to talk about how to provision a NAT (Network Address Translation) Instance from scratch, using AWS Linux 2 and CloudFormation. We’re going to provision an auto-healing NAT, meaning an instance launched by an auto-scaling group with a desired capacity of 1, so if our instance crashes the auto-scaling group with terminate it for us and spin up a new one. This is much like the auto-healing Bastion Host I provisioned in a previous post, Provision a Bastion Host to our VPC with CloudFormation. So the CloudFormation template for this NAT Instance is very similar to the Bastion Host template, and this post will focus only on the differences.
Bash
Linux Hardening for your Bastion Host
This post is going to provide a brief description of basic Linux hardening for the Bastion Host I created using CloudFormation in my last post. Really it’s hardening 101 for any Linux host, but this kind of information is surprisingly hard to find on the Internet. For instance, I read a bunch of posts that say don’t run services you don’t need, but with no practical advice on how to implement that (like how to figure out what services are running on a typical Linux box, or which specific ones I might want to stop and why). The absolute best post I’ve seen on the subject is 40 Linux Server Hardening Security Tips [2019 edition]. I didn’t actually find this post until after I’d worked through the things I’m going to implement in this post, but it covered them all and a whole lot more, so you could just go there and skip this post, however, it’s pretty complex and hard to follow in some parts, and I’m going to provide a simple explanation for some simple hardening, so you might want to stick around.