Catch Me If You Can: Detecting Server-Side Request Forgery Attacks on Amazon Web Services

Cloud infrastructure offers significant benefits to organizations capable of leveraging rich application programming interfaces (APIs) to automate environments at scale. However, unauthorized access to management APIs can enable threat actors to compromise the security of large amounts of sensitive data very quickly. Practitioners have documented techniques for gaining access through Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities that exploit management APIs within cloud providers. However, mature organizations have failed to detect some of the most significant breaches, sometimes for months after a security incident. Cloud services adoption is increasing, and firms need effective methods of detecting SSRF attempts to identify threats and mitigate vulnerabilities. This paper examines a variety of tools and techniques to detect SSRF activity within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment that can be used to monitor for real-time SSRF exploit attempts against the AWS API. The research findings outline the efficacy of four different strategies to answer the question of whether security professionals can leverage additional vendor-provided and open-source tools to detect SSRF attacks.