A More Secure Way of Granting Access to Private Content — I recently published cloudfront-signed-cookies, a package available on the PyPI index that allows you to quickly generate signed cookies for secure access to resources behind a CloudFront distribution such as an object in an S3 bucket. In this blog, I’ll talk a little about CloudFront signed cookies and demonstrate how…

Leveraging AWS Request Context for Authorization — In AWS, authorization to resources can be granted based on the actions that you allow or deny within a given IAM policy. An IAM policy can be attached to an IAM identity (user, group, or role) or directly to a resource as a resource-based policy. The body of an IAM…

Quickly Find your AWS Resources!! — AWS has launched Resource Explorer — a service that simplifies the process of finding resources by name, ARN, tags, IDs, etc. The new service also supports a feature called views which allows you to create filters (for a list of filters, check out this link) for resources that you’re looking…

The “4Shell” Sequel Continues??? — Another vulnerability exploiting insecure string substitution in the Java programming language has been found. This time the vulnerability impacts Apache’s Commons Text library which provides APIs for string manipulation. The vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2022–42889 and has a CVSS critical rating of 9.8. According to researchers, the likelihood of…

Identifying Threats in Your Design — As an application security engineer, I spend a lot of time performing design document reviews for new services or features created by some of the best engineers in the world, which involves a lot of threat modeling. Identifying threats to a system or process is the first step towards creating…

Raw HTTP-based Payloads For The Win — Hello, World! In this blog, I am going to provide a brief walkthrough of hoaxshell — a recent Windows reverse shell currently not detected by Windows Defender developed by t3l3machus. Let’s go for it! Setup Requirements: git, python3 INFO: I like to create a Python virtual environment before running pip install…

Novel Dynamic Malware Loader — Hello, World! Malware loaders allow threat actors to download or load and execute copies of payloads from their command and control (C2) servers to carry out the first stage of their cyber attack. Bumblebee is a new malware loader widely adopted by sophisticated adversaries due to its dynamic capabilities such…

Scoping Down Permissions from the Organizations Level to the Sessions Level — Hello, World! If you’ve setup one or more of the policies allowed by AWS, you might be interested in comprehending the order in which different AWS policy types are evaluated. In my previous blog post, I talked about the different types of access policies one can leverage in AWS to…

Flexible Access Control for Finer-Grained Permissions — Hello, World! AWS IAM is AWS’s most important service; all AWS services depend on AWS IAM. AWS IAM supports various types of access policies with specific use cases — from managing access across a large number of AWS accounts, to managing access for an individual resource, AWS IAM offers numerous…