Book Image

AWS Penetration Testing

By : Jonathan Helmus
Book Image

AWS Penetration Testing

By: Jonathan Helmus

Overview of this book

Cloud security has always been treated as the highest priority by AWS while designing a robust cloud infrastructure. AWS has now extended its support to allow users and security experts to perform penetration tests on its environment. This has not only revealed a number of loopholes and brought vulnerable points in their existing system to the fore, but has also opened up opportunities for organizations to build a secure cloud environment. This book teaches you how to perform penetration tests in a controlled AWS environment. You'll begin by performing security assessments of major AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda. Throughout the course of this book, you'll also learn about specific tests such as exploiting applications, testing permissions flaws, and discovering weak policies. Moving on, you'll discover how to establish private-cloud access through backdoor Lambda functions. As you advance, you'll explore the no-go areas where users can’t make changes due to vendor restrictions and find out how you can avoid being flagged to AWS in these cases. Finally, this book will take you through tips and tricks for securing your cloud environment in a professional way. By the end of this penetration testing book, you'll have become well-versed in a variety of ethical hacking techniques for securing your AWS environment against modern cyber threats.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting Up AWS and Pentesting Environments
4
Section 2: Pentesting the Cloud – Exploiting AWS
12
Section 3: Lessons Learned – Report Writing, Staying within Scope, and Continued Learning

Exploring and configuring AWS APIs

Have you ever wondered how information goes from your computer to a website or the backend server of that website? Well, typically, your request is sent from your browser and then goes through something called an application programming interface (API). An API is an interface implemented to allow other applications or hosts to interact with one central point. In this case, the API is the central point and the applications will be services that we interact with within AWS. 

So, what does this mean with AWS and how are we going to be using it through this book? Well, first we need to understand the basic terms of what an Amazon API is and how the Amazon API gateway manages services. We will get an understanding of this by looking at some high-level views of APIs in an AWS environment, and then later learn how to intercept and manipulate an API request the same way we would in a real-life pentest. 

AWS API Gateway is a managed service...