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 - https://blog.appsecco.com/aws-changes-its-pentesting-permission-requirement-appsecco-found-out-exactly-what-is-allowed-and-b3603b85de7

Additional references

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