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

Discovering SSH keys

SSH, or secure shell, is a common login service that various system administrators implement in their infrastructure. The fast and secure system makes the service ideal for security purposes, as well as "feasibility" due to its key-like infrastructure. The keys make authentication seamless, much like we did back in Chapter 1, Building Your AWS Environment, with the keys that we downloaded from our AWS instance. Those keys give us "the keys to the kingdom," so to speak, and allow us access to our AWS instances.

How the keys work

A private and public key must be made to use the service. When creating a key pair, a private key is generated and stored on the system. In this case, the keys are stored in our EC2 instances. Private keys are keys that should never be shared with anyone, ever. Recent years have shed light on private exposures and the damage they have caused companies.

Figure 3.6 – Public and private...