There's a Hole in 1,951 Amazon S3 Buckets | Hacker News Reader

There's a Hole in 1,951 Amazon S3 Buckets

community.rapid7.com

80 pointstechinsidr19 comments

This is all really obvious though...

The title and the first 80% of the article is written to allow a casual reader to infer that there is a problem with S3... simply put this isn't the case, and through brute force guessing the researchers were able to find some publicly accessible files containing sensitive information in a bucket... (assuming of course that the bucket owner didn't intend for the bucket to be public in the first place?)

This really isn't restricted or exclusive to just S3 buckets.. if you randomly hit enough web accessibly URLs you'll find confidential/sensitive material else where as well. People might feel slightly more confident or relaxed in what they store on S3, but the author doesn't make any convincing points to suggest this.

The findings are on a par with research such as "eating fatty food causes heart problems", or "exercise is good for you"... or "Amazon S3 service used as intended causes pages to be publicly accessible"...

If the Summly could do research TL;DRs as well, it would be, "S3 buckets set to public are accessible to anyone".

True. However, there is value in a company like Amazon licensing or creating their own suite of tests like those performed by this researcher that would warn users if they are likely exposing files publicly that they probably shouldn't be exposing. e.g. "We found that the following files appear to contain password data and are publicly viewable. Are you sure you want these files to be listed publicly?

AWS actually already does proactively monitor and send out alert emails to customers who have LIST enabled to Everyone on their S3 buckets, which is a good thing.

Anyone who has learned to use S3 knows that there is a usability problem with S3.

Permissions on S3 are not at all easy or intuitive, and the documentation on it is terrible. Even setting up very simple scenarios is a huge hassle, and it doesn't surprise me at all that there's tons of buckets with incorrect permissions as a result.

I remember at some point when I was still a newbie with S3 I originally had the permissions for my company's S3 bucket too open. Even though it was a public bucket, containing image assets which were intended to be distributed publicly over the internet, I was allowing the LIST operation to be made against the bucket. Amazon actually sent me an automated warning email that I should remove public LIST permissions from the bucket, because allowing LIST operations could result in high S3 usage charges if someone started crawling our S3 bucket.

Removing public LIST access not only prevents charges from accruing from LIST operations but also allows you to keep your S3 resources semi-private even in a public bucket, by using hard-to-guess private URL's. Going to the root of the bucket no longer shows the list of files, instead it just shows an Access Denied message.

I don't know if Amazon still sends out the automated message, but if they do then those 1,951 open buckets are from people who either ignored the warning or couldn't figure out how to follow Amazon's instructions on how to fix the vulnerability.

Amazon uses a Wizard-type agent at certain support levels that scans your setup and builds you a report of everything you can save money on and security issues, etc.

http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/faqs/#TAwhat

Careful. You don't want to go to jail for telling people about open, public information on the Internet that you accessed just by going to a URL.

Though overly snarky, you have a great point. Wasn't Weev just sent to jail for exactly this? Doing http gets against "guessed" URLs without authorization?

Yes.

No, he went to jail because after that, he wrote a script, scraped through all the URLs and collected private information, then bragged in IRC about stuff he could do with it.

"It should be emphasized that a public bucket is not a risk created by Amazon but rather a misconfiguration caused by the owner of the bucket."

So not really a hole so much as it's configured that way. Title implies that this is a breach of some kind, which it's not.

Yeah, what's the point of this article? Public buckets are public, who would guess?!

Seems to be really about misconfiguration and serving as a reminder for developers to check permissions on AWS buckets. While some data is obviously stored in public bucks for a reason, it's clear that much of the data Rapid7 was able to find in the "open" buckets was not intended to be made available to the public. It's not a security flaw with AWS, but an administrative oversight really, but at least a good reminder for everyone to go check their buckets :)

The point seems to be that this is a really common misconfiguration and you should probably double-check to make sure you did yours right.

Also, AWS usually notifies the account owners in such cases. I remember getting at least 3 such emails across all the AWS accounts I have been an owner of.

Interestingly enough, how do rapid 7 think that they're able to do this sort of thing? It goes against Amazon's terms of service and AUP, not to mention against the people who have the data in insecurely configured buckets. In light of Weev's sentencing and the sad case of Aaron Swartz, is there one law for security companies and one law for individuals?

I appreciate that one can say they're carrying out important research, but did they notify the people with open buckets or are they more interested in PR?

There is a hole in your s3 bucket dear Liza

I am going to guess you were downvoted for totally screwing up the meter.

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