▶Book Description
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, there is a lot of in-depth coverage of the 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.
▶What You Will Learn
- Familiarize yourself with and pentest the most common external-facing AWS services
- Audit your own infrastructure and identify flaws, weaknesses, and loopholes
- Demonstrate the process of lateral and vertical movement through a partially compromised AWS account
- Maintain stealth and persistence within a compromised AWS account
- Master a hands-on approach to pentesting
- Discover a number of automated tools to ease the process of continuously assessing and improving the security stance of an AWS infrastructure
▶Key Features
- Efficiently perform penetration testing techniques on your public cloud instances
- Learn not only to cover loopholes but also to automate security monitoring and alerting within your cloud-based deployment pipelines
- A step-by-step guide that will help you leverage the most widely used security platform to secure your AWS Cloud environment
▶Who This Book Is For
If you are a security analyst or a penetration tester and are interested in exploiting Cloud environments to reveal vulnerable areas and secure them, then this book is for you.
A basic understanding of penetration testing, cloud computing, and its security concepts is mandatory.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Setting Up a Pentesting Lab on AWS, focuses on setting up a vulnerable Linux virtual machine (VM) as well as a generic Windows VM on AWS and putting it on the same network as the Kali instance.
- Chapter 2, Setting Up a Kali Pentestbox on the Cloud, focuses on creating an Amazon EC2 instance, setting it up with a Kali Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and configuring remote access to this host through a variety of means.
- Chapter 3, Exploitation on the Cloud Using Kali Linux, walks you through the process of scanning for vulnerabilities in a vulnerable lab, exploiting these vulnerabilities using Metasploit, gaining reverse shells, and various other exploitation techniques. This serves to help budding pentesters practice on a cloud environment that simulates real-life networks.
- Chapter 4, Setting Up Your First EC2 Instances, walks you through the concepts of EC2 instance sizes, different types of instances and their uses, AMIs and the creation of custom AMIs, various storage types, the concept of input/output operations per second (IOPS), Elastic Block Stores, security policies, and virtual private cloud configurations.
- Chapter 5, Penetration Testing of EC2 Instances Using Kali Linux, focuses on the methods for performing a security assessment on an EC2 instance.
- Chapter 6, Elastic Block Stores and Snapshots – Retrieving Deleted Data, introduces you to the different types of storage options that are available through AWS, extending the information covered in Chapter 3, Exploitation on the Cloud Using Kali Linux.
- Chapter 7, Reconnaissance – Identifying Vulnerable S3 Buckets, explains the concept of AWS S3 buckets, what they're used for, and how to set them up and access them.
- Chapter 8, Exploiting Permissive S3 Buckets for Fun and Profit, goes through the process of exploiting a vulnerable S3 bucket to identify JavaScript files that are being loaded by a web application and backdooring them to gain a pan-user compromise.
- Chapter 9, Identity Access Management on AWS, focuses on one of the most important concepts in AWS that is meant to manage user identity and access to various layers of services within AWS.
- Chapter 10, Privilege Escalation of AWS Accounts Using Stolen Keys, Boto3, and Pacu, focuses on using the Boto3 Python library and the Pacu framework to leverage AWS keys for a wide range of attacks within an AWS environment. We go through the processes of enumerating access validity, identity information, and complete account information as well as enumerating information such as that pertaining to S3 buckets and EC2 instance metadata. This will also cover the process of automating some of the steps that we covered in earlier chapters. Finally, the steps to change and set administrator roles for a given user or group are also covered.
- Chapter 11, Using Boto3 and Pacu to Maintain AWS Persistence, deals with permission enumeration and privilege escalation, which are integral to AWS pentests.
- Chapter 12, Security and Pentesting of AWS Lambda, focuses on creating vulnerable Lambda applications and executing them within a code sandbox. Once the architecture has been set up, we focus on pivoting to connected application services, and achieving code execution within a Lambda sandbox as well as achieving ephemeral persistence. To further simulate an actual pentest, there is a walk-through of running a vulnerable Lambda application and achieving subsequent compromise.
- Chapter 13, Pentesting and Securing AWS RDS, focuses on explaining the process of setting up a sample Relational Database Service (RDS) instance and connecting it to a WordPress instance in a secure, as well as an insecure, way.
- Chapter 14, Targeting Other Services, is designed to show some attacks on some less common AWS APIs. This chapter deals with misconfigurations and attack vectors available in Route53, SES, CloudFormation, and Key Management Service (KMS).
- Chapter 15, Pentesting CloudTrail, helps us deal with one of the most detailed sources of information within an AWS environment, which is CloudTrail. CloudTrail logs can be a treasure trove of information to a potential attacker regarding the internal operations of various AWS services, virtual machines, and users, alongside significant amounts of other useful information.
- Chapter 16, GuardDuty, introduces you to GuardDuty, the dedicated intrusion detection system for AWS. You will be exposed to the range of GuardDuty alerting capabilities and how it relies on the CloudTrails listed in the previous chapter. After covering the monitoring and alerting capabilities of GuardDuty, we'll explore GuardDuty as an attacker and how to bypass AWS security monitoring capabilities.
- Chapter 17, Using Scout Suite and Security Monkey, introduces you to another automated tool, Scout Suite, which performs an audit on the attack surface within an AWS infrastructure and reports a list of findings that can be viewed on a web browser. It also deals with Security Monkey, which, on the other hand, monitors AWS accounts for policy changes as well as continuously monitoring for insecurity configurations.
- Chapter 18, Using Pacu for AWS Pentesting, puts together many of the Pacu concepts given throughout the previous chapters, walking you through the full capabilities of the AWS attack framework, Pacu. Modular and easily extendable, we'll walk through the structure of Pacu, how to build new enumeration and attack services, and leverage the existing framework for complex AWS pentests.
- Chapter 19, Putting it All Together – Real-World AWS Pentesting, brings together the various concepts to walk you through a real-world AWS penetration test, starting with the enumeration of permissions, the escalation of privileges, the backdooring of accounts, the compromising EC2 instances, and the exfiltration of data.
