Book Image

Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

By : Karl Gilbert, Benjamin Caudill
Book Image

Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

By: Karl Gilbert, Benjamin Caudill

Overview of this book

The cloud is taking over the IT industry. Any organization housing a large amount of data or a large infrastructure has started moving cloud-ward — and AWS rules the roost when it comes to cloud service providers, with its closest competitor having less than half of its market share. This highlights the importance of security on the cloud, especially on AWS. While a lot has been said (and written) about how cloud environments can be secured, performing external security assessments in the form of pentests on AWS is still seen as a dark art. This book aims to help pentesters as well as seasoned system administrators with a hands-on approach to pentesting the various cloud services provided by Amazon through AWS using Kali Linux. To make things easier for novice pentesters, the book focuses on building a practice lab and refining penetration testing with Kali Linux on the cloud. This is helpful not only for beginners but also for pentesters who want to set up a pentesting environment in their private cloud, using Kali Linux to perform a white-box assessment of their own cloud resources. Besides this, the book covers a large variety of AWS services that are often overlooked during a pentest — from serverless infrastructure to automated deployment pipelines. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify possible vulnerable areas efficiently and secure your AWS cloud environment.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Kali Linux on AWS
5
Section 2: Pentesting AWS Elastic Compute Cloud Configuring and Securing
9
Section 3: Pentesting AWS Simple Storage Service Configuring and Securing
12
Section 4: AWS Identity Access Management Configuring and Securing
16
Section 5: Penetration Testing on Other AWS Services
20
Section 6: Attacking AWS Logging and Security Services
23
Section 7: Leveraging AWS Pentesting Tools for Real-World Attacks

Signing AWS API requests manually

Most AWS API calls require that certain data in them be signed before sending them to the AWS servers. This is done for a few different reasons, such as allowing the server to verify the identity of the API caller, to protect data from modification while it is in transit to the AWS servers, and to prevent replay attacks, where an attacker intercepts your request somehow and runs it again themselves. By default, a signed request is valid for five minutes, so technically, replay attacks are possible if the request is intercepted and re-sent prior to that five minute window closing. The AWS CLI and AWS SDKs (such as the boto3 Python library at https://boto3.amazonaws.com/v1/documentation/api/latest/index.html) automatically handle all request signing for you, so you don't need to think about it.

There are a couple of cases where you may need...