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

Getting started with Burp Suite

This section of the chapter will discuss a tool that we have yet to use in this book. The tool that we will be using is a proxy tool that allows us to perform security testing on web applications, and in our case, it will enable us to intercept requests being sent to and from our AWS API targets. This means that Burp Suite will give us full control over requests sent via our web browser, making us able to manipulate calls to and from APIs.

Important note

A proxy is a server or a service that inspects and analyzes traffic before it is sent to our target.

Intercepting calls to and from APIs allows us to see parameters such as tokens, sessions, and other attributes that may be able to be altered to make the API accept calls that it shouldn't. This is a fairly common technique that is used by bug bounty hunters and web application penetration testers. 

Important note

A bug bounty hunter is a freelance penetration tester who works...