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

Setting up a lab for SQLi

The next exercise we are going to go over involves setting up an EC2 instance, installing a vulnerable web program, and installing the Docker service on your EC2 instance. Once everything is up and running, we'll start looking into some actual SQLi and testing vulnerable areas of the web application.

The vulnerable application we are installing, Juice Shop, is a very popular web application full of hacking challenges that range from different levels of difficulty – it even comes with a hacker dashboard that you can use to track your progress. To discover more about this application, OWASP has a page full of useful information about the project (https://owasp.org/www-project-juice-shop/).

Important note

This exercise does not involve Aurora – it involves SQLi and pentesting parameters that you may see used with websites using Aurora. The purpose of the exercise is to get more familiar with SQLi and how dangerous it can be.

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