Bypass Restrictions in API Gateway

This fun and beginner friendly lab provides a good methodology to follow when starting to assess the security of Application Programming Interfaces. It showcases API Gateway features, and how we can leverage these as red teamers to increase our access!

As part of a red team engagement, we have gained access to several AWS CodeCommit repositories. In one of the repositories we found hardcoded AWS access keys and a development API endpoint. Can you use this to compromise more than the development environment, and help increase our access?

• Using cURL to interact with resources
• Familiarity with the command line

• Understanding of the Amazon API Gateway service
• Understanding of API security and how to approach it
• Making changes to resource policies and deploying new configurations
• IAM policy enumeration

An API (Application Programming Interface) gateway is a key part of modern software stacks. Acting like a middleman between users and the backend systems, it serves as a single entry point to handle and protect access to various APIs. Being able to assess API security by exploiting vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and exposures, and learning how to prevent making these mistakes are very important skills for penetration testers, software engineers and DevOps professionals alike.

Amazon API Gateway is a comprehensive service from AWS that allows the creation, deployment, and management of APIs at scale. It provides functionalities like transforming requests and responses, managing access through authorization, controlling request rates (throttling), and integrating seamlessly with AWS services (i.e. Lambda)."