Everything You Need to Know About AWS Penetration Testing Report

Updated: December 3rd, 2024
7 mins read
AWS Penetration Testing Report

Over the past decade, cloud computing has become an important part of every organization’s IT strategy. When looking at cloud providers, AWS comes first due to its highest (33%) market share in the industry. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers remote computing services that make up an on-demand distributed computing platform.

AWS provides a broad set of global computing, storage, databases, analytics, applications, and other services. The AWS services include hosted servers (Amazon EC2), database services (Amazon RDS), content delivery (Amazon CloudFront), a service for deploying software applications, and platform services (Amazon S3).

AWS security of the cloud has become a much-needed practice to keep the cloud infrastructure secure from hackers. A comprehensive AWS penetration testing and its well-written AWS Penetration Testing Report can help organizations understand security vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure and fix them before a hacker can exploit them.

What is AWS Security?

AWS Security refers to a range of configurations, tools, or features that make the public cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) secure. The term is generally used to refer to the security provided at the data center level instead of security at the individual account level. Amazon and not the individual users manage the AWS security controls.

Some of the AWS security tools offered by Amazon are:

1. AWS Inspector

AWS Inspector evaluates the security of applications by reviewing server-side configurations and then testing the live instances for compliance with AWS security best practices.

The inspector performs a wide range of security checks on your applications and infrastructure and provides you with detailed reports about your AWS resources. Security checks include AWS resource inventory checks for EC2 instances, VPCs, IAM users and groups, and IAM policies. Compliance checks are performed to control access to AWS resources. AWS best practices checks that ensure that you are following AWS security and compliance best practices.

2. AWS Security Hub 

AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that automates best practice checks, aggregates alerts and supports automated remediation. The service provides centralized visibility into the security state of your AWS resources and helps you mitigate risks quickly. 

One can use AWS Security Hub to monitor and manage multiple accounts, including cross-account access and resources. AWS Security Hub is managed entirely through the AWS Management Console and supports integrations with your existing monitoring tools.

3. AWS Macie

Amazon Macie helps you discover, classify and protect sensitive data in Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. It provides you with a detailed audit trail of data access activity and allows you to control access to data.

What is AWS Penetration Testing?

A proper AWS penetration test in the cloud is a thorough evaluation of the security of a cloud environment. AWS offers a penetration test service for User-Operated Services, including cloud offerings created and configured by the user. This service gives organizations a better understanding of the security of their AWS resources.

Does AWS allow Penetration Testing?

Although AWS allows pentesting on their services, there are specific boundaries to what an AWS ethical hacker can play with, while the rest remains out of bounds for pen-testing.

Here’s a list of services that AWS allows pentesting on:

  • Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environments
  • Amazon EC2 instances, NAT Gateways, and Elastic Load Balancers
  • Amazon RDS
  • Amazon Cloud Front
  • Amazon Aurora
  • Amazon API Gateways
  • AWS Lambda and Lambda Edge functions
  • Amazon LightSail resources

List of AWS controls to be Audited for Security

1. Governance

  • Understand AWS usage/implementation
  • Identify assets & define AWS boundaries
  • Access Policies
  • Identify, review & evaluate risks
  • Documentation and Inventory
  • Add AWS to risk assessment
  • IT security & program policy

2. Network Management

  • Network Security Controls
  • Physical links
  • Granting & revoking accesses
  • Environment Isolation
  • Documentation and Inventory
  • DDoS layered defense
  • Malicious code controls

3. Encryption Control

  • AWS Console access
  • AWS API access
  • IPSec Tunnels
  • SSL Key Management
  • Protect PINs at rest

4. Logging & Monitoring

  • Centralized log storage
  • Review policies for ‘adequacy’
  • Review the IAM credentials report
  • Aggregate from multiple sources
  • Intrusion detection & response

What is an AWS Penetration Testing Report?

The AWS penetration testing report is the outcome of penetration testing performed on the AWS environment by penetration testers. It is written in the format of a report that includes all the findings of the penetration testing performed so that management or clients can take corrective actions to patch vulnerabilities on time.

AWS Penetration Testing Report is an in-depth review of your critical AWS infrastructure with actionable recommendations for improvement. It includes a full review of your account configuration and security settings, detailed scan results, and a summary of findings, including an extensive POC (Proof of Concept) for each finding.

What’s to look for in an AWS Penetration Testing Report?

A penetration testing service report should be clear and precise so that anyone can read and understand the security posture of the cloud infrastructure. The AWS penetration testing report is a critical document, a result of a penetration test, a set of notes, and questions to be answered.

The penetration testing report helps to answer questions for a security team to improve the security posture of an AWS Cloud infrastructure.

Here are a few things that should be inside the AWS penetration testing report:

  1. AWS services scanned with vulnerabilities.
  2. Detailed description of each vulnerability.
  3. Severity & CVSS score.
  4. Business Impact.
  5. Downtime to fix the risk.
  6. Steps to fix the vulnerability.
Key Components of AWS Pentest Report
Image: Key Components of AWS Pentest Report

Importance of AWS Penetration Testing Report

AWS penetration testing report is a document that gives a comprehensive overview of vulnerabilities along with POCs (Proof of Concept) and actionable mitigation steps to fix those vulnerabilities on priority. The AWS penetration testing report will highlight any way in which an attacker could gain access to your AWS environment.

It helps you prioritize your vulnerabilities according to the severity of the issues found in the AWS system. AWS penetration testing report will enable you to understand the security posture of your AWS environment and help you stay compliant with various regulatory standards like GDPR, PCI, EPA, and ISO270001.

 Reporting in Astra Pentest Dashboard
Image: Reporting in Astra Pentest Dashboard

Astra’s AWS Penetration Testing Solution

Astra is a cyber security company that offers a cloud-based security testing solution that provides a full spectrum of threat simulation capabilities that can be used to test security controls across the entire AWS platform. The solution delivers the next generation of cloud security testing, providing a wide variety of attack vectors, an inherent AWS knowledge base, and a range of customizable attack types to mimic the actions of the most sophisticated adversaries.

Astra’s AWS Penetration Testing Solution has been designed to merge the best practices of penetration testing and red team exercises. Astra’s scanner tests for more than 10,000 test cases are prioritized according to your assets and needs.

AWS Penetration Testing Dashboard
Image: AWS Penetration Testing Dashboard

Final Thoughts

AWS penetration testing is a crucial step in securing your assets in the cloud against potential risks and emerging threats. An AWS penetration testing report provides you with actionable insights into the security posture of your systems and helps you ensure their security. AWS penetration testing reports help you stay compliant to various regulatory standards and ensure user trust and your reputation.