Episode description

Links:

• S3 Bucket Negligence Award: http://saharareporters.com/2022/01/10/exclusive-hacker-breaks-nimc-server-steals-over-three-million-national-identity-numbers
• Anyone in a VPC, any VPC, anywhere: https://Twitter.com/santosh_ankr/status/1481387630973493251
• A disgruntled developer corrupts their own NPM libs ‘colors’ and ‘faker’, breaking thousands of apps: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dev-corrupts-npm-libs-colors-and-faker-breaking-thousands-of-apps/
• “Top ten security best practices for securing backups in AWS”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/top-10-security-best-practices-for-securing-backups-in-aws/
• Glue: https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2022-002/
• CloudFormation: https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2022-001/
• S3-credentials: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jan/18/weeknotes/

Transcript

Corey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it’s nobody in particular’s job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.

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Corey: So, yesterday’s episode put the boots to AWS, not so much for the issues that Orca Security uncovered, but rather for its poor communication around the topic. Now that that’s done, let’s look at the more mundane news from last week’s cloud world. Every day is a new page around here, full of opportunity and possibility in equal measure.

This week’s S3 Bucket Negligence Award goes to the Nigerian government for exposing millions of their citizens to a third party who most assuredly did not follow coordinated disclosure guidelines. Whoops.

There’s an interesting tweet, and exploring it is still unfolding at time of this writing, but it looks that making an API Gateway ‘Private’ doesn’t mean, “To your VPCs,” but rather, “To anyone in a VPC, any VPC, anywhere.” This is evocative of the way that, “Any Authenticated AWS User,” for S3 buckets caused massive permissions issues industry-wide.

And a periodic and growing concern is one of software supply chain—which is a fancy way of saying, “We’re all built on giant dependency chains”—what happens when, say, a disgruntled developer corrupts their own NPM libs ‘colors’ and ‘faker’, breaking thousands of apps across the industry, including some of the AWS SDKs? How do we manage that risk? How do we keep developers gruntled?

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AWS had a couple of interesting things. The first is “Top ten security best practices for securing backups in AWS”. People really don’t consider the security implications of their backups anywhere near seriously enough. It’s not ‘live’ but it’s still got—by definition—a full set of your data just waiting to be harvested by nefarious types. Be careful with that.

And of course, AWS had two security bulletins, one about its Glue issues, one about its CloudFormation issues. The former allowed cross-account access to other tenants. In theory. In practice, AWS did the responsible thing and kept every access event logged, going back for the full five years of the service’s life. That’s remarkably impressive.

And lastly, I found an interesting tool called S3-credentials last week, and what it does is it helps generate tightly-scoped IAM policies that were previously limited to a single S3 bucket, but now are limited to a single prefix within that bucket. You can also make those credential sets incredibly short-lived. More things like this, please. I just tend to over-scope things way too much. And that’s what happened Last Week in AWS: Security. Please feel free to reach out and tell me exactly what my problem is.

Corey: Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition with the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—a...