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

Inspecting traffic with Burp Suite

This next section is going to go over how we can inspect our traffic to and from the REST API we just created. Inspecting traffic with Burp Suite is crucial to network pentesting and web application penetration testing because it allows us to see all the communications over a particular connection. While we won't worry about network intercepting, we will be using many of the same techniques used in web application penetration testing. 

Before we begin moving forward with inspecting traffic, we need to ensure that we do some quick housekeeping before we get started. We will need to ensure that we have deployed our AWS API gateway too so that we can learn how to intercept traffic coming to and from the REST API.

Deploying the API gateway

To get started, log back into the AWS console and go to the API that we created at the beginning of this chapter: 

Figure 8.15 – Selecting our API

Click on the...