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

Enumerating and understanding AWS services

Enumeration is the process of gathering information that gives you valuable characteristics about a target during the recon of a target. Enumeration involves performing reconnaissance and scanning your targets. This means getting information about services, domain names, ports, and so on. While we have been performing enumeration by gathering open source information, let's take a quick look at some of the AWS services that we may target or encounter during an AWS pentest. Discussing these services allows us to understand more about our targets before we begin exploiting them.

Important note

For more information on enumeration, check out the penetration testing standard: http://www.pentest-standard.org/.

S3 buckets and discovering open buckets with web apps

S3 buckets are a great resource provided by AWS. S3 buckets act as "containers" that allow users to store objects, or data, in them that can be retrieved at any...