Always keep this hacking technique in mind

Imagine that during an engagement you come across a static website, with only an image on the home page and standard files from a frontend framework. You have already reviewed them and found no sensitive information, no route or anything relevant. You have also found (maybe while analyzing HTTP headers) that the server is behind the Cloudfront CDN. End of the line, right?

Or maybe not...

Also imagine that, by intuition, you suspect that there is an AWS S3 bucket behind the CDN, serving static files. The problem is that you don't have the name of this bucket to be able to test it.

The good news is that by causing signature inconsistencies and causing errors in handling requests, the server can leak this information.

POST / HTTP/2

Host: flow.redacted.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Content-Length: 9



logging=1

When sending the above request, the response received was something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Error>

    <Code>SignatureDoesNotMatch</Code>

    <Message>The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method.</Message>

    <AWSAccessKeyId>REDACTED</AWSAccessKeyId>



    <StringToSign>

        POST 



        application/x-www-form-urlencoded



        x-amz-date:REDACTED

        /redacted-bucket-name/index.htm?logging

    </StringToSign>



    <SignatureProvided>REDACTED</SignatureProvided>

    <StringToSignBytes>REDACTED</StringToSignBytes>

    <RequestId>REDACTED</RequestId>

    <HostId>REDACTED</HostId>

</Error>

And no, this bucket was not "fully exposed", but it was configured so that any authenticated user (from any account) on AWS could access it.

aws s3 sync s3://redacted-bucket-name .

From then on some of juicy info was found! After obtaining the AWS keys (a process that I will not describe here, but I can only say that it is sad when they are in files inside a public bucket), with the console command in the Pacu framework it is possible to access the account in the browser.

And this was another case of a security misconfiguration gone terrible!