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

Pentesting methodology for AWS

This section will deviate from the traditional pentesting methodology used for a non-cloud pentesting environment. We don't follow the conventional pentesting methods primarily due to our target's scope – in this case, our target would be an AWS environment. Additionally, we will be performing functional testing with valid credentials provided by the client that is being pentested.

Important note

Functional testing is a means and method of scanning and checking for vulnerabilities and misconfigured services that have been implemented by users.

This whole chapter will discuss the dos and don'ts of pentesting and discuss details that need to be understood before and after performing a pentest. However, before we get into any of that, we need to understand the steps on how we deliver a pentest against AWS.

Let's break down the four different steps in performing a pentest on an AWS target:

  1. Reconnaissance
  2. ...