ECScape: When Containers Play ‘Capture the Flag’ with Your AWS Credentials!
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an “end-to-end privilege escalation chain” in Amazon ECS, dubbed ECScape. This allows attackers to hijack IAM privileges, turning a low-privileged app into a cloud-pilfering ninja. Sweet Security’s findings highlight the need for stronger isolation models to prevent such cloud chaos.
Hot Take:
Who knew container orchestration could be this orchestrated? Amazon ECS containers are playing a dangerous game of ‘who wore it better’ with IAM roles, and it seems like everyone wants to be the star of the show. ECScape is the latest cybersecurity soap opera, where low-privileged containers dream of being more than just a sidekick on the EC2 stage. Grab your popcorn, because this privilege escalation drama is about to unfold!
Key Points:
- A vulnerability in Amazon ECS allows for privilege escalation through credential hijacking.
- Sweet Security researcher Naor Haziz dubbed this attack technique “ECScape.”
- ECScape exploits an undocumented ECS protocol to impersonate higher-privileged tasks.
- Amazon recommends adopting stronger isolation models to mitigate the threat.
- It’s advised not to mix high and low privilege tasks on the same ECS instance.