Dead-letter queues (DLQs)
DLQs serve as a safety net, capturing events that fail to reach their intended targets. These queues can be monitored to provide additional security insights, such as identifying patterns of failed deliveries that could indicate a security issue. For example, a sudden increase in the number of failed events could be a red flag for a potential DDoS attack or data store compromise.
EventBridge’s support for DLQs ensures that events are not lost due to delivery failures, thereby enhancing both the reliability and security of event-driven applications. This feature is crucial for both debugging and forensic analysis in the event of security incidents, allowing investigators to examine the failed events for signs of malicious activity or vulnerabilities.
Event sourcing
Event sourcing is a pattern that can significantly bolster security by creating an immutable audit trail of events. In the context of EventBridge, this involves capturing a series of events that represent state changes in an application. For instance, consider a banking application that needs to keep track of all deposit and withdrawal events to provide a detailed account activity history. Using EventBridge, this application could capture such events from its core services and route them to a Lambda function, which then stores these events in a database for future retrieval and analysis. This creates a comprehensive log of all the events or commands that have altered the application’s state.
By storing these events chronologically, the application can reconstruct the exact state of entities at any given point in time. This is invaluable for security analysts who may need to rewind the system state to analyze past security incidents. This immutable event log acts as a single source of truth, thereby strengthening the integrity and non-repudiation of security-sensitive operations.