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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned quite a bit about S3 buckets and some ways to exploit common public bucket issues. We also learned more about AWS Regions and Availability Zones and what they are in relation to S3 buckets and AWS in general. The chapter also went over various scripting languages such as Python and Bash, and how we can use Python and Bash to scan S3 buckets.

To finish off, we took a look at a "real-world" scenario by applying proof of concept to a public S3 bucket that we made. It's encouraged that you create your own scenarios and execute them – while staying within the legal bounds of AWS practices and policies.

Finally, we took a look at some other projects that can help us dive more into S3, without having to use AWS. Technology such as MinIO is a great resource to use if you're looking to set up a local S3 bucket lab.

In the next chapter, we will go over what RDS is by discussing some key points and setting up an RDS database...