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

Public buckets

Public buckets are one of the largest health risks to AWS and S3. Large amounts of data leaks have been reported due to misconfigurations in S3 due to a poor security posture. Some of the issues that have been reported are as follows:

  • A lack of monitoring of S3 buckets. Without monitoring, there really isn't a stable way to check access to your S3 environments.
  • A lack of testing and auditing of S3 environments proves to be a security issue. Something as simple as a vulnerability assessment or even a simple pentest would help highlight issues that can be easily fixed.
  • Relaxed policies are another issue. If policies let too many users access S3 resources, issues could arise if those accounts become compromised.

Popular opinions revolving around the security of S3 highlights that monitoring will heighten the security posture of S3; however, monitoring is only half the battle. As we saw, having an overly permissive policy can also allow users...