An adversary may attempt to discover resources that are available within an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. This includes compute service resources such as instances, virtual machines, and snapshots as well as resources of other services including the storage and database services.
Cloud providers offer methods such as APIs and commands issued through CLIs to serve information about infrastructure. For example, AWS provides a <code>DescribeInstances</code> API within the Amazon EC2 API that can return information about one or more instances within an account, the <code>ListBuckets</code> API that returns a list of all buckets owned by the authenticated sender of the request, or the <code>GetPublicAccessBlock</code> API to retrieve access block configuration for a bucket (Citation: Amazon Describe Instance)(Citation: Amazon Describe Instances API)(Citation: AWS Get Public Access Block). Similarly, GCP's Cloud SDK CLI provides the <code>gcloud compute instances list</code> command to list all Google Compute Engine instances in a project (Citation: Google Compute Instances), and Azure's CLI command <code>az vm list</code> lists details of virtual machines.(Citation: Microsoft AZ CLI)
An adversary may enumerate resources using a compromised user's access keys to determine which are available to that user.(Citation: Expel IO Evil in AWS) The discovery of these available resources may help adversaries determine their next steps in the Cloud environment, such as establishing Persistence.(Citation: Mandiant M-Trends 2020)An adversary may also use this information to change the configuration to make the bucket publicly accessible, allowing data to be accessed without authentication. Adversaries have also may use infrastructure discovery APIs such as <code>DescribeDBInstances</code> to determine size, owner, permissions, and network ACLs of database resources. (Citation: AWS Describe DB Instances) Adversaries can use this information to determine the potential value of databases and discover the requirements to access them. Unlike in Cloud Service Discovery, this technique focuses on the discovery of components of the provided services rather than the services themselves.
View in MITRE ATT&CK®| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| resourcemanager | ResourceManager | technique_scores | T1580 | Cloud Infrastructure Discovery |
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Resource Manager can easily modify your Cloud Identity and Access Management policies for your organization and folders, and the changes will apply across all the projects and resources. Create and manage IAM access control policies for your organization and projects. This control may prevent adversaries that try to discover resources by placing a limit on discovery of these resources with least privilege.
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| resourcemanager | ResourceManager | technique_scores | T1580 | Cloud Infrastructure Discovery |
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GCP allows configuration of account policies to enable logging and IAM permissions and roles that may detect compromised user attempts to discover infrastructure and resources.
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| identityplatform | IdentityPlatform | technique_scores | T1580 | Cloud Infrastructure Discovery |
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Identity Platform is a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform that helps organizations add identity and access management functionality to their applications, protect user accounts, and scale with confidence on Google Cloud. With this, permissions are limited to discover cloud accounts in accordance with least privilege.
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| policy_intelligence | Policy Intelligence | technique_scores | T1580 | Cloud Infrastructure Discovery |
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IAM Recommender helps admins remove unwanted access to GCP resources by using machine learning to make smart access control recommendations. With Recommender, security teams can automatically detect overly permissive access and rightsize them based on similar users in the organization and their access patterns. This control may mitigate adversaries that try to enumerate users access keys through VM or snapshots.
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