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

Prohibited activities

It's essential to understand what activities are allowed and which ones are not when it comes to pentesting. As we have stated throughout this book, this is what we call within scope and out of scope. When we mention systems that are within scope, we are discussing what we can test, at what times, and how much impact we can have on those within scoped hosts. However, it is just as important to know what is out of scope as well. Knowing what is out of scope ensures that you only test what the client is requesting and keeps you and your team from dodging any type of legal fines or punishment. 

The following sections are going to discuss what AWS states as prohibited activities toward their infrastructure and service. Remember that part of the shared security model relies on AWS and its uptime for its hardware – so AWS has a say in how its product is tested. 

Let's move forward and discuss the prohibited attacks on AWS – DoS...