CREST CREST Cloud & Infrastructure Security

Question 1

In the cloud shared responsibility model (AWS), who is responsible for patching the guest operating system on an EC2 instance?

Accepted Answer

The customer

Answer

Under the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, but customers are responsible for patching and securing their guest operating systems on EC2.

Question 2

Which attack technique involves exploiting overly permissive IAM roles or policies in AWS to escalate privileges?

Accepted Answer

IAM privilege escalation via misconfigured roles or policies

Answer

Overly permissive IAM policies (e.g., iam:PassRole, sts:AssumeRole) can be exploited by attackers to escalate privileges or assume higher-privileged roles within AWS.

Question 3

What security risk does an exposed AWS S3 bucket with public read permissions present?

Accepted Answer

It exposes stored data to the public internet, potentially leaking sensitive files

Answer

Publicly accessible S3 buckets expose all stored objects to anyone on the internet, leading to data breaches involving credentials, backups, customer data, and source code.

Question 4

What is Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) in a cloud context and why is it particularly dangerous on AWS?

Accepted Answer

An attack that tricks a server into making requests to internal resources, including the AWS metadata endpoint (169.254.169.254) to steal IAM credentials

Answer

SSRF in AWS can be used to query the EC2 instance metadata service (169.254.169.254), retrieving temporary IAM credentials that grant the attacker cloud access.

Question 5

Which cloud security principle recommends giving users and services only the minimum permissions needed to perform their function?

Accepted Answer

Principle of least privilege

Answer

The principle of least privilege limits IAM roles, user permissions, and service accounts to only the specific permissions required for their function, reducing blast radius from compromise.

(CREST) Council for Registered Ethical Security Testers Practice Test

(CREST) Council for Registered Ethical Security Testers Practice Test

CREST CREST Cloud & Infrastructure Security