AWS Security Review

A structured audit of an AWS account or organization.

1. IAM Deep Dive

• Enumerate users, roles, policies (identity + resource + permission boundaries)
• Hunt privilege escalation paths: iam:CreatePolicyVersion, iam:PassRole + ec2:RunInstances/lambda creation, sts:AssumeRole chains, iam:SetDefaultPolicyVersion
• Wildcard actions/resources on trust boundaries; NotAction with Effect: Allow traps
• Unused credentials, access keys older than 90 days, no rotation
• Check trust policies: roles assumable by * or by external account IDs

Tools

• scoutSuite, prowler, pmapper (privilege escalation graph), cloudsplaining (least-privilege diffs)

2. Exposure Review

• S3: public buckets/block public access at account level; ACLs vs bucket policy conflicts
• EBS/RDS/redshift snapshots: shared or public
• Load balancers/security groups: 0.0.0.0/0 on management ports (22/3389), database ports exposed
• API Gateway, Lambda function URLs, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch domains with open access policies

3. Encryption and Data

• Default encryption on S3/EBS/RDS; KMS key policies scoped correctly
• Secrets Manager vs hardcoded values in env vars committed to IaC
• CloudTrail: multi-region, log file validation, no public bucket; GuardDuty enabled

4. Network

• VPC flow logs on; NAT gateway vs IGW placement for private subnets
• Peering/transit gateway routes leaking ranges
• Public subnets hosting workloads that should be private

5. Workload Identity

• EC2 instance profiles over long-lived keys; EKS IRSA / pod identity
• Tasks/containers without privileged modes; metadata service v2 enforced

Output

Ranked findings: exposure (public data/ports), privilege escalation chains (with pmapper-style path evidence), logging gaps, and remediation mapped to specific policy/resource ARNs.