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

White box/functional pentesting Aurora

Just as we did before with RDS, we are going to look and see what we can find out about Aurora from a pentesting point of view. We know the environment since we set it up, but for the sake of the next exercise, let's say we are pentesting an Aurora instance. This test involves looking at whether the instance is accessible by the public, how strong the password field is, and anything else we may be able to do while looking at the instance.

The reason we want to do this is to expose the white box pentesting methodology in as many cases as possible. White box pentesting is the most common pentesting methodology because it allows pentesters to fully pentest everything for both functional purposes and compliance purposes. We are going to apply this to our Aurora instance.

Our engagement starts off with scanning the Aurora instance. Remember, we don't know anything except the address of the instance!

Recon – scanning for public...