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

Knowing the attacker

Say you are on a pentesting assignment, and your client asks you to test their systems. There are a couple of ways we can do this. We can do it from an outsider perspective, or from an insider perspective. Both offer the client a different return of results and return on investment based on the client's business needs. Let's take a quick look at what exactly an insider and an outsider are.

Insiders

The more common request will be from an insider perspective. Insiders are considered employees or someone with access to the client's systems. This means you, the tester, would be given the information needed to connect to the AWS environment. You'll be given an account ID and credentials to access the cloud environment, and from there can let your scripts run to find issues in S3.

Often, white-box pentesting will be combined with an insider perspective. What that translates into is the client needs the pentesting firm to check for anything...