AWS Privilege Escalation + Service Abuse

Phase 3 — AWS Privilege Escalation + Service Abuse

This phase is best done after you are comfortable with IAM enumeration and leaked credential workflows.

Learning Objectives

• Abuse weak S3 bucket policies to gain elevated cloud access.
• Practice role-assumption attack paths, including trust-policy and external ID misuse.
• Exploit service misconfigurations in Cognito, SQS, and Lambda.
• Understand serverless attack chains and data access expansion.
• Strengthen cloud-auth understanding with boto3, STS, S3, and Secrets Manager.

Lab Path

Order	Lab	Type	Summary
13	Exploit Weak Bucket Policies for Privileged Access	🔴 Red	Abuse overly permissive S3 bucket policies to gain privileged access paths.
14	S3 Bucket Brute Force to Breach	🔴 Red	Discover exposed buckets with wordlists and use leaked data for lateral movement.
15	Assume Privileged Role with External ID	🔴 Red	Learn role assumption mechanics and trust-policy abuse with external ID contexts.
16	Abuse Cognito User and Identity Pools	🔴 Red	Exploit Cognito misconfigurations to gain cloud access and pivot through Lambda workflows.
17	SQS and Lambda SQL Injection	🔴 Red	Execute serverless SQL injection paths involving SQS-triggered Lambda processing.
18	Understand Authentication Mechanisms Using Boto3	🔴 Red	Build practical understanding of AWS authentication flows using Python, boto3, STS, S3, and Secrets Manager.

Key Knowledge After Phase 3

1. Privilege escalation often starts from policy weaknesses, not just leaked keys.
2. Trust relationships are high-value targets, especially role assumption with loose external ID handling.
3. Service chaining increases impact: Cognito, SQS, and Lambda can become pivot channels across accounts and data planes.
4. Serverless components are attack surface, and event-driven logic can hide injection and privilege abuse.
5. Strong auth-flow literacy is critical for both offense and defense when validating real AWS permission boundaries.