This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity.
AWS environment security assessment with Scout2
19 Feb 2014 – Loïc Simon
Security engineers at iSEC Partners are regularly involved in projects that require assessing the security of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Thoroughly reviewing AWS configuration requires poring through dozens to hundreds of pages in the AWS console, depending on the environment’s size. In 2012, iSEC Partners released AWS Scout to help AWS administrators assess their environment’s security posture. Unfortunately, APIs have changed since then, and the tool wasn’t written in a particularly maintainable fashion.
AWS Scout2
iSEC Partners developed a new, more comprehensive, version of AWS Scout in order to address its need for an AWS configuration review tool. AWS Scout2 is an open-source application written in Python that connects to the AWS API and downloads configuration data for the following AWS services:
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Simple Storage Service (S3)
The information gathered is then rendered in an offline HTML report. In addition to AWS configuration, this HTML report displays a number of security risks.
Project page
iSEC Partners is pleased to release AWS Scout2 to the security community. See the Github repository page for full details on how to download and use the tool:
