Never once have I ever found a use case for making public EBS snapshots.
Who on Earth is thinking that it is a good idea to take an EBS snapshot and make it public?
Note, several of those engagements did involve multiple accounts, and the need to share / copy AMIs and/or snapshots between accounts. But never making them public.
"Nope, can't access it" ...
"Nope, still can't access it"...
"My manager is harassing me to get access now"...
"Look, just make it public then change it back after I get it copied"...
It's why I hate all the password rotation, double VPN stuff - people work around it too much.
All the old staff start having the tech person track their passwords or write them near the computer, all the young staff use whatever new .io domain does X super easily (but less securely) or stick things on thumb driver (no keypad) or use their personal google drive etc.
There needs to be controls like S3 where you can explicitly block public data.
AWS IAM kind of sucks.
Non-marketplace AMIs are built on public EBS snapshots, but that's something they should still fix. Marketplace AMIs already handle private snapshots
Maybe they're trying to reproduce functionality of docker? It would actually be extremely useful for research involving modeling/AI because you could trivially reproduce the results by bundling the exact code and data.
Edit: actually maybe I'm confusing EBS snapshots with AMIs...
https://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-public-ebs-danger/
He just got notified by AWS a couple days ago about the public snapshot he mentioned in the article.
But at least AWS is trying to make things better here by proactively checking for public EBS snapshots and notifying people.
It seems unlikely a lot of people didn't already know about this, it's hard to miss even if you only spend a few days with the EC2 API, and it's also quite surprising AWS have yet to correct the design. 90% chance it is mostly a UI problem -- there are no warning labels around snapshotting in the EC2 UI
Snapshots are private by default, you have to actively make them public (impossible if encrypted) or share them (which also requires sharing the associated keys if encrypted.)
Now, AWS hasn't wrapped the extra layer of “by default, reject any setting or policy allowing public or cross-account access unless separate additional default switches have been toggled off” thing to EBS that they have to S3. But people still expose stuff via S3, so that's hardly a panacea. At some point, one has to conclude that customers are responsible, in many cases for giving too many(or just the wrong) people admin access to their accounts.
I think they have it for some stuff elsewhere, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to make public snapshots a per-account permission that defaults to disabled, and requires an interactive UI checkbox to enable. Out of the millions of AWS accounts, public snapshots are legitimately useful to maybe 1000 tops
For EBS - nothing is public by default, so customers have to willingly decide to click buttons to make it public.
By default, if I create a snapshot, it is NOT public...
It reminds me a bit of old time cdroms.
For S3 I'm not sure how people are building their lists. AFAIK the API provides no enumeration. So this is possibly something coming from web crawl data (e.g. common crawl)
The talk description is here: https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-27/dc-27-speakers.html#Mo...
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/06/aws-trust...
I am so confused.
It would be trivial to make finding a snapshot require knowing a unique ID like an AMI.
And, why do I need to be able to search for 1000s of customers' public snapshots in the EC2 console? What conceivable purpose does that serve except being a giant opsec fail?
Later I told the EFF I had a suspicion that iOS didn’t rate limit input events to the lock screen, independently a research found out about it a month later.
Even if there are zero days, I don’t think finding them is a particularly noteworthy or rewarding task.
Amazon should make an emergency decision to make all these private.
Sure it will break stuff but I'd be disappointed if Amazon left what is in effect a security hole open for the sake of backwards compatibility.
They should also give me a single click link when I sign in to show me all of my public ebs snapshots and throw it hard in my face when I sign in to the console so I simply cannot avoid seeing them all.
I have multiple AWS accounts and I just signed in to try to see if I have any public EBS snapshots and then I realised I would need to search every single region in every single account and then select every snapshot one by one to find out. That's a huge problem. I need a single click to show me every exposed snapshot across every region in my account.
UPDATE:
I can't say for sure if this is 100% right but I think if you sign in to your AWS account, then click on each of these links, you will find if you have public snapshots.
Maybe someone else could confirm if this is correct?
https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://us-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://ca-central-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?regi...
https://eu-central-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?regi...
https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://eu-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://eu-west-3.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://eu-north-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region...
https://ap-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
https://ap-northeast-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?re...
https://ap-northeast-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?re...
https://ap-northeast-3.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?re...
https://ap-southeast-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?re...
https://ap-southeast-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?re...
https://ap-south-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region...
https://me-south-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region...
https://sa-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...
