Here is one of those topics where you can often run into misinformation when you are studying AWS. That is because the rules keep changing, and you will often have textbooks and courses quoting old rules still!
So here is the skinny as of 10/20/2019! You no longer have to obtain permission from AWS for pen testing your own resources within 8 of the total services of AWS. NOTE: Be sure not to pen test against any AWS services themselves, as this is never permitted. In fact, if you should discover vulnerabilities in a service itself when you are pen testing your resources, you are encouraged to report that to the AWS Security team. What are the 8 services? Here they are:
- EC2, including NAT Gateways and Elastic Load Balancers
- RDS
- CloudFront
- Aurora
- API Gateways
- Lambda and Lambda Edge
- Lightsail
- Elastic Beanstalk
You should also note that Amazon currently prohibits the following tests:
- 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)
These rules will change again in the future. Be sure to subscribe to the blog using the widget in the right column. When the rules change – I will be sure to let you know!
Thanks for reading, and have fun in AWS! Just not too much fun!
