Book Image

Penetration Testing Azure for Ethical Hackers

By : David Okeyode, Karl Fosaaen
Book Image

Penetration Testing Azure for Ethical Hackers

By: David Okeyode, Karl Fosaaen

Overview of this book

“If you’re looking for this book, you need it.” — 5* Amazon Review Curious about how safe Azure really is? Put your knowledge to work with this practical guide to penetration testing. This book offers a no-faff, hands-on approach to exploring Azure penetration testing methodologies, which will get up and running in no time with the help of real-world examples, scripts, and ready-to-use source code. As you learn about the Microsoft Azure platform and understand how hackers can attack resources hosted in the Azure cloud, you'll find out how to protect your environment by identifying vulnerabilities, along with extending your pentesting tools and capabilities. First, you’ll be taken through the prerequisites for pentesting Azure and shown how to set up a pentesting lab. You'll then simulate attacks on Azure assets such as web applications and virtual machines from anonymous and authenticated perspectives. In the later chapters, you'll learn about the opportunities for privilege escalation in Azure tenants and ways in which an attacker can create persistent access to an environment. By the end of this book, you'll be able to leverage your ethical hacking skills to identify and implement different tools and techniques to perform successful penetration tests on your own Azure infrastructure.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding the Azure Platform and Architecture
5
Section 2: Authenticated Access to Azure

Pillaging keys, secrets, and certificates from Key Vaults

Azure Key Vault is a service for managing application secrets, keys, and certificates in the Azure platform (Figure 6.41). The primary use case of Key Vault is to provide a secure way for application developers to centrally store sensitive information that their code needs to use at runtime without making that information part of the code. The sensitive information that is commonly stored in Key Vault could be tokens, passwords, data store connection strings, API keys, and other secret types.

Figure 6.41 – How applications access the Key Vault

As you could imagine, a service like Key Vault is usually a popular target for attackers, as it potentially contains information that can be used to move laterally in an attack chain or used to decrypt encrypted information.

Access to a Key Vault resource is controlled through two planes (Figure 6.42) – the management plane, which has an endpoint...