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

Fun with SQLi

Now that we have everything set up, let's move forward and do some pentesting on the vulnerable web application, Juice Shop. If you need a refresher on what SQLi is and how it works, please review Chapter 5, Understanding Vulnerable RDS Services.

Before we can begin, we need to make sure of a couple of things:

  1. Our EC2 instance with Juice Shop is started and accessible via a web browser. This will ensure that we can access it for the following exercises.
  2. Our local Kali Linux virtual machine is started up in a virtual box.

Once you have completed both of those steps, proceed to the public DNS of your Juice Shop EC2 instance. Next, let's move to the scoreboard to see what challenges are on the web application.

Move to the directory in your web browser: http://<<public dns>>/#/score-board/:

Figure 6.11 – The Juice Shop scoreboard

Important note

Finding /score-board is a challenge within the...