Skip to main content

AWS Security Anti Patterns

The below are a few security anti patterns for AWS cloud which should be avoided when implementing comprehensive cloud security strategy:

Security Anti-patterns Categories:
- Account Structure
- N/w design
- Auditing
- S/W delivery

AntiPattern (Account Structure): Personally owned AWS account
- Make sure the Root account (login, MFA) is not tied to a person's email id. Root email id should be tied to team DL
- Root MFA must be tied with some sort of official hardware device
- Contact info etc must be of office address
- No one logs into the account root. Use IAM only.

Anti-pattern (Account Structure): AWS account overcrowding
- Not all and every services/ teams should be placed under one single account. It becomes very hard to manage policy wise and governance wise
- If admin creds for the account is compromise, the blast radius will be more, all the services get compromised
- If some of the services are in scope for compliance, and since they are not separated, it'll be a concern from Compliance perspective.
- Multi- account pattern is recommended. Where the accounts are grouped logically.

Anti-pattern (N/W design): Trusted IP access w/p client auth

- Routing should not be treated as security
- Segregate and use a lot of relevant edge devices and services to achieve defense in depth- AWS Shield, API Gateway, IAM auth, cert etc

Anti-pattern (N/W design):N/W egress back hauling
- Don't directly talk to internet. Restrict egress via Exit VPC
- Use VPC endpoint to talk to publicly hosted services such as S3.

Anti-pattern (Auditing): Questionnaires
- Create attestations instead of entertaining long list of client's questionnaires about the organization's security postures and implementations.
- Get certifications/ assurances and maintain standards sich as ISO 2Ks, SOc2, PCI -DSS etc

Anti-pattern (Auditing): Manual technical auditing
- Inconsistent
- Time consuming, not frequent
- USe automated continuous auditing tools and processes such as Cloud Watch, Inspector, Trusted adviser, Evident.io
- Practice DevSecOps- securit as a code, proactive controls enforced by code

Anti-pattern (S/W delivery): Over-the-wall s/w delivery
- Dev, QA, and ops kept separte- no concept of DevOps basically
- A lot of manual process
- Infrequent release cycles
- Implement DevSecOps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ardilla- New tool for finding SQL Injection and XSS

Three Researchers -- MIT's Adam Kiezun , Stanford's Philip Guo , and Syracuse University's Karthick Jayaraman -- has developed a new tool ' Ardilla ' that automatically finds and exploits SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Web applications. It creates inputs that pinpoint bugs in Web applications and then generates SQL injection and XSS attacks. But for now Ardilla is for PHP -based Web app only. The researchers say Ardilla found 68 never-before found vulnerabilities in five different PHP applications using the tool -- 23 SQL injection and 45 XSS flaws. More information is awaited. For their attack generation techniques refer to their document at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mernst/pubs/create-attacks-tr054.pdf
Post a Comment
Read more

File Upload through Null Byte Injection

Sometimes, during file upload we come across situation wherein there would be check on the file extension at the client side as well as server side too. If the application does allow only .jpeg extension to be uploaded, the client side java script checks for the extension of the file before passing the request. We all know that how easily this can be defeated. Some applications, checks for the extension at the server side also. That's not easy to bypass. However there are some ways with which it still can be bypassed. Most of server side scripts are written in high level languages such as Php, Java etc who still use some C/C++ libraries to read the file name and contents. That leads to the problem. In C/C++ a line ends with /00 or which is called Null Byte. So whenever the interpreter sees a null byte at the end of the a string, it stops reading thinking it has reached at the end of the string. This can be used for the bypass. It works for many servers, specially php servers. T
1 comment
Read more

jtool - an alternative to otool

jtool comes with a capability of running on Linux environment. Some ipa scanning tools are created to run on Linux environment where mac environment is not available. In such cases tools such as otool and class-dump-z will not work. So jtool can be an alternative to otool. For more information on jtool please refer to http://www.newosxbook.com/tools/jtool.html . It lists down various commands which have same output as otool or a equivalent. There are several commands mentioned in link. But for our customized requirements and basis checks I have listed down the below ones after running on many binaries. The outputs are similar or equivalent to otool and class-dump-z: Commands for checking PIE flag (ASLR) in jTool jtool -d -v -arch | grep stack ·           Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) protection: jtool -d -v -arch | grep _objc_release ·           To check if the device is jailbroken: jtool -d -v -arch | grep jail ·           Dyldinfo compatible options
1 comment
Read more