AC-17 Remote Accessac-17

The commands split cleanly across the control family, and the gap in the middle is the one to be honest about. AC-17(1) — automated monitoring and control of remote access — is what session history and connection logs deliver, with two documented blind spots. Session Manager does not log sessions that connect through port forwarding or SSH, because SSH encrypts the session data inside the TLS connection and Session Manager is only the tunnel; an operator who port-forwards leaves a session record with no command content behind it. And describe-sessions reaches back 30 days only, so anything longer is an S3 or CloudWatch Logs query against the destinations named in the preferences document, not an SSM call. Client VPN retention is shorter still — terminated connections drop out of the API after 60 minutes, which makes the log group named in ConnectionLogOptions the only durable record, and Username is populated only for Active Directory authentication, so certificate-authenticated users are identified by CommonName or not at all. AC-17(2) is the strongest link in GovCloud, where the endpoints are FIPS 140-3 modules by construction; the Session Manager equivalent is kmsKeyId in the preferences document, and it is empty unless you set it, so an empty kmsKeyId is a finding rather than a default. AC-17(3) — routing remote access through managed network access control points — is the one nothing here proves. Session Manager and a Client VPN endpoint are managed access points, and ec2-instance-no-public-ip is the closest negative check, but that rule applies only to IPv4 and only to AWS::EC2::Instance: an IPv6-reachable instance, a load balancer fronting SSH, or a third-party jump host is invisible to it. Read the result as 'no EC2 instance carries a public IPv4 address', which is a useful sentence and not the control. AC-17 itself — the documented usage restrictions, configuration requirements and per-type authorization — is a record you write, and this telemetry only shows whether the estate matches it. One warning to carry into the evidence package: Session Manager logs the commands entered and their output, so a credential typed into a session lands in the log group you are about to hand an assessor.