Cloud Penetration Testing

Cloud Penetration Testing

What is Cloud Penetration Testing

Cloud penetration testing is designed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a cloud system to improve its overall security posture. Cloud pen test is performed under strict guidelines from the cloud service providers like AWS, and GCP.

What are the benefits of cloud penetration testing?

Cloud penetration testing empowers organizations to bolster the security of their cloud environments, prevent avoidable breaches to their systems, and remain compliant with their industry’s regulations. It does this by helping to identify vulnerabilities, risks, and gaps in a security program. The actionable remediation advice it provides allows security teams to prioritize activities and attend to security issues in alignment with their greatest business risks.

Specifically, cloud pen testing

• Helps improve an organization’s overall visibility into business risk
• Helps identify vulnerabilities
• Demonstrates the potential impact of identified vulnerabilities if they were exploited
• Provides clear remediation advice to fix vulnerabilities and mitigate their associated risk

What is the Purpose of Cloud Penetration Testing?

The prime purpose of this is to find security issues in your cloud service before hackers do. Different types of manual methods and cloud penetration testing tools may be used depending on the type of your cloud service and the provider. However, since you do not own the cloud infrastructure/platform/software as an entity but rather as a service, there are several legal and technical challenges to performing cloud penetration tests.

Most Common Cloud Vulnerabilities

There are quite a few vulnerabilities that can lead to a compromised cloud account. Mentioning each one is beyond the scope of this article so; the most prominent ones are mentioned below:

1. Insecure APIs

APIs are widely used in cloud services to share information across various applications. However, insecure APIs can also lead to a large-scale data leak as was seen in the case of Venmo, Airtel, etc. Sometimes using HTTP methods like PUT, POST, DELETE in APIs improperly can allow hackers to upload malware on your server or delete data.

2. Server misconfigurations

Cloud service misconfigurations are the most common cloud vulnerability today (misconfigured S3 Buckets, in particular). The most common cloud server misconfigurations are improper permissions, not encrypting the data and differentiation between private and public data.

 

3. Weak credentials

Using common or weak passwords can make your cloud accounts vulnerable to brute force attacks. The attacker can use automated tools to make guesses thereby making way into your account using those credentials. The results could be disastrous leading to a complete account takeover.

4. Outdated software

Outdated software contains critical security vulnerabilities that can compromise your cloud services. Most of the software vendors do not use a streamlined update procedure or the users disable automatic updates themselves.

5. Insecure coding practices

Most businesses try to get their cloud infrastructure built for as cheaply as possible. So, due to poor coding practices, such software often contains bugs like SQLi, XSS, CSRF.

 

                What are the cloud pen testing methods?

There are three types of cloud pen testing. Determining which type of testing to use depends on the specific needs and requirements of the system(s) under test. All three forms involve testers “poking and prodding” the system as an attacker would, in order to identify real and exploitable weaknesses in the system.

• White box testing: Testers have admin-level access to the cloud environment, allowing them the most complete access and knowledge about the system(s) they are attempting to compromise.
• Gray box testing: Testers have some knowledge about the system(s) they are attempting to hack.
• Black box testing: Testers have no knowledge about or access to cloud systems before beginning their testing activities.

 

Blog By: Priyanka Rana