In 2022, a critical security vulnerability in AWS's Instance Metadata Service (IMDSv1) sent shockwaves through the cloud security community. This vulnerability, which could be exploited through Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, allowed attackers to hijack AWS infrastructure using nothing more than a terminal and some clever command-line tools.
The Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) is a service that provides temporary credentials and other instance-specific information to EC2 instances. IMDSv1, the original version, was designed with simplicity in mind but lacked crucial security features. It allowed any process running on an EC2 instance to access metadata without authentication, making it vulnerable to SSRF attacks.
Attackers exploited this vulnerability using terminal-based tools like curl or wget. By tricking a vulnerable application into making a request to the IMDS endpoint (http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/), they could retrieve temporary AWS credentials and gain unauthorized access to AWS resources.
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/AWS responded with IMDSv2, which implements a session-oriented approach with the following security enhancements:
To protect your AWS infrastructure:
For more detailed information about implementing IMDSv2 and securing your AWS infrastructure, check out the official AWS Security Blog post.
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