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

Chapter 7: Assessing and Pentesting Lambda Services

Lambda services run code that can later respond to events and other tasks within the Lambda environment as needed. These events and tasks are anything that occurs within the AWS environment – HTTP requests, modifications to S3 buckets, and new EC2 instances being brought up, for instance. This makes Lambda an essential service when it comes to setting up and extending a network and its services for an organization. However, Lambda does present some issues, such as creating weak restrictions on accessing Lambda, vulnerable functions that can carry out unauthorized actions, and rules built within the Lambda policies that allow exploitation to occur.

This chapter will focus on how vulnerability discovery in Lambda can lead to exploiting services and discovering internal processes and objects.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

  • Understanding and setting up Lambda services
  • Digging into Lambda...