# AWS Pentesting Requirements Amazon lifted the requirement for permission seeking in April 2019 before a pentest. Amazon now allows the following 8 services to be tested without seeking explicit permission. * Amazon EC2 instances, NAT Gateways, and Elastic Load Balancers * Amazon RDS * Amazon CloudFront * Amazon Aurora * Amazon API Gateways * AWS Lambda and Lambda Edge functions * Amazon Lightsail resources * Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environments The following is a list of prohibited activities * Prohibited Activities * DNS zone walking via Amazon Route 53 Hosted Zones * Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Simulated DoS, Simulated DDoS * Port flooding * Protocol flooding * Request flooding (login request flooding, API request flooding) ## Limitations * There are some limitations that need to be kept in mind when testing, especially security tests that could lead to a potential Denial of Service. Appsecco asked AWS to clarify some of the vagueness in their testing policy and AWS responded to our questions. The exchange can be seen here - ## Additional references * [AWS Penetration Testing](https://aws.amazon.com/security/penetration-testing/) * [Submit a Penetration Testing request FAQ](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/penetration-testing/) * [AWS Changes its pentesting permission requirement](https://blog.appsecco.com/aws-changes-its-pentesting-permission-requirement-appsecco-found-out-exactly-what-is-allowed-and-b3603b85de7) --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://0xcriminal.gitbook.io/about-me/cloudsec/pentesting-requirements-for-the-cloud/pentesting-requirements-aws.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.