Modernize your Penetration Testing Architecture on AWS Fargate
AWS Architecture BlogModernize your Penetration Testing Architecture on AWS Fargateby Conor Walsh and Alex Castañedez | on14 DEC 2021| inAmazon API Gateway,Amazon Elastic Container Service,Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),Architecture,AWS Fargate,AWS Lambda,Containers,Serverless|Permalink|ShareOrganizations in all industries are innovating their application stack through modernization. Developers have found that modular architecture patterns, serverless operational models, and agile development processes provide great benefits. They offer faster innovation, reduced risk, and reduction in total cost of ownership.Security organizations must evolve and innovate as well. But security practitioners often find themselves stuck between using powerful yet inflexible open-source tools with little support, and monolithic software with expensive and restrictive licenses.This post describes how you can use modern cloud technologies to build a scalable penetration testing platform, with no infrastructure to manage.The penetration testing monolithAWS operates under theshared responsibility model, where AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, and the customer is responsible for securing workloads in the cloud. This includes validating the security of your internal and external attack surface. Following the AWSpenetration testing policy, customers can run tests against their AWS accounts, except for denial of service (DoS).A legacy model commonly involves a central server for running a scanning application among the team. The server must be powerful enough for peak load and likely runs 24/7. Common licensing for scanner software is capped on the number of targets you can scan. This model does not scale, and incurs cost when no assessments are being performed.Penetration testers must constantly reinvent their toolkit. Many one-off tools or scripts are built during engagements when encountering a unique problem. These tools and their environments are often customized, making standardization between machines and software difficult. Building, maintaining, and testing UI/UX and platform compatibility can be expensive and difficult to scale. This often leads to these tools being discarded and the value lost when the analyst moves on to the next engagement. Later, other analysts may run into the same scenario and need to rebuild the tool all over again, resulting in duplicated effort.Network security scanning using modern cloud infrastructureBy using modern cloud container technologies, we can redesign this monolithic architecture to one that scales to meet increased demand, yet incurs no cost when idle. Containerization provides flexibility and secure isolation.Figure 1. Overview of the serverless security scanning architectureScanning task flowThis workflow is based on the architecture shown in Figure 1:User authenticates toAmazon Cognitowith their organization’s SSO.User makes authorized request toAmazon API Gateway.Request is forwarded to anAWS Lambdafunction that pulls configuration fromAmazon Simple Storage Service (S3).Lambda function validates parameters, incorporates them into the task definition, and callsAmazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).ECS orchestrates worker nodes usingAWS Fargatecompute engine and initiates task.ECS asynchronously returns the task configuration to Lambda, which sanitizes sensitive data and sends response through API Gateway.The ECS task launches one or more containers, which run the tool.Scan results are stored in the ephemeral storage provided by Fargate.Final container in the ECS task copies the scan report to S3.Now we’ll describe the different components of the architecture shown in Figure 1. Start by packaging one’s favorite tool into a container, and publish it toAmazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). ECR provides your containers additional layers of security assurance with built-independency vulnerability scans.AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine powering Amazon ECS to orchestrate container tasks. Fargate scales up capacity to support the current load, and scales down once complete to reduce cost. By default, Fargate offers 20 GB of ephemeral storage to each ECS task for shared storage between containers as volume mounts.Task input and output can be processed with custom code running on the serverless computing service AWS Lambda. For multi-stage Lambda functionality, you can useAWS Step Functions.Amazon API Gateway can forward incoming requests to these Lambda functions. API Gateway provides serverless REST endpoints to handle requests processed by Lambda functions. Amazon Cognito authorizes users through API Gateway or your organization’s single-sign on (SSO) provider.The final step of the ECS task can upload any resulting files to an Amazon S3 bucket. Amazon S3 offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance with integration into other AWS services. This means that the results of your data can be consumed by other AWS services for processing, analytics, machine learning, and security controls.Amazon CloudWatch Eventsare used to build an event-based workflow. The S3 upload initiates a CloudWatch Event, which can then invoke a Lambda function to process the file, or launch another ECS task.This solution is completely serverless. It will scale on demand, yet cost nothing when not in use. This architecture can support anything that can be run in a container, regardless of tool function.Network Mapper workflowFigure 2. Network Mapper scanner task workflowThe example in Figure 2 was based on using a tool called Network Mapper, or Nmap. However, a variety of tools can be used, including nslookup/dig, Selenium, Nikto, recon-ng, SpiderFoot, Greenbone Vulnerability Manager (GVM), or OWASP ZAP. You can use anything that runs in a container! With some additional work, findings could be fed into AWS security services likeAWS Security Hub, orAmazon GuardDuty. You can also use AWS Partner Network services like Splunk and Datadog, or open source frameworks like Metasploit and DefectDojo. The flexibility to add additional applications that integrate with AWS services means that this architecture can be easily deployed into a variety of AWS environments.Remember, installation and use of software not included in an AWS-supported Amazon Machine Image (AMI) or container, falls into the customer side of the shared responsibility model. Make sure to do your due diligence in securing any software you decide to use in this or any workload. To reduce blast radius, run this in an isolated account and only provide least privilege access to targets.ConclusionIn this blog post, we showed how to run a penetration testing workload on a modern platform, powered with serverless, and container-based services. Amazon API Gateway is the entry point for your architecture, which calls on AWS Lambda. Lambda builds a task definition to launch a fully orchestrated, on-demand container workload using AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS. The final stage of the ECS task copies the results of the scan to Amazon S3. This can be accessed by security analysts or other downstream containers, tools, or services.We encourage you to go build this architecture in your own environment, and begin conducting your own tests! Construct your Nmap container and store it in Amazon ECR or usesecurecodebox/nmap, a Docker container built for the Open Web Application Security Project® (OWASP)SecureCodeBoxproject. Make sure to spend time securing this workload, especially when using open-source software you’re not familiar with. Now go get scanning!Conor WalshConor Walsh is a computer scientist with a focus on network and application security. In the past, he's helped secure organizations across a variety of industries as an in-house engineer as well as a consultant. Now, as an AWS Security Engineer on the Product Security team, he helps to hold up AWS's side of the shared responsibility model, keeping the bar high for security of the cloud to earn and maintain the trust of our customers. When not working he usually spends time with friends, family, and a menagerie of pets, playing video games, traveling around the world to paintball tournaments, or getting off the grid.Alex CastañedezAlex Castañedez is an enterprise solutions architect based in Pittsburgh, PA. He helps customers in the enterprise sector plan and realize their cloud adoption strategies on AWS. Alex has experience helping customers extend and implement cloud tools to improve their posture. In his spare time Alex enjoys flight simulation and hopes to fly one day.
Organizations in all industries are innovating their application stack through modernization. Developers have found that modular architecture patterns, serverless operational models, and agile development processes provide great benefits. They offer faster innovation, reduced risk, and reduction in total cost of ownership. Security organizations must evolve and innovate as well. But security practitioners often find themselves […]
Conor Walsh
Amazon API Gateway Amazon Elastic Container Service Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Architecture AWS Fargate AWS Lambda Containers Serverless