Cloud penetration testing

Cloud penetration testing attacks the part of the cloud you are responsible for: identity and permissions, exposed storage, workloads, containers, and the pipelines that deploy them. The provider's own infrastructure is not yours to test and testing it is prohibited. Everything you configured on top of it is yours, and that is where the findings are.

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For teams who moved fast and configured as they went

Organizations with several cloud accounts, some created by teams that no longer exist, and no single view of who can reach what.

Engineering teams running containers and CI/CD, where the pipeline holds credentials that reach production directly.

Security teams with a posture tool full of misconfiguration findings and no proof of which ones actually chain into access to data.

[ CONFIGURATION IS NOT THE SAME AS ACCESS ]

A posture finding, a host finding, and a path to your data

Cloud security posture tools are good and you should run one. What they produce is a list of deviations from a baseline, ranked by a rule rather than by consequence. A cloud penetration test starts from those same conditions and asks the only question a board cares about: does this chain into access to something that matters, and how far does it go?

What you are actually buying

CSPM / configuration review

Traditional infrastructure pentest

Cloud penetration test

What it evaluates

Configuration measured against a baseline

Hosts, ports and services

Configuration plus identity, plus the path that connects them

An open storage bucket

Reported as a misconfiguration

Usually outside the scope entirely

Reported as a path: what was in it, and what those contents unlocked next

Privilege escalation through IAM

Flagged only when it matches a known rule

Not evaluated

Chained and proven, role by role, up to the account boundary

The CI/CD pipeline

Rarely in scope

Not in scope

Treated as what it is: a credentialed route into production

Serverless and managed services

Configuration only

Invisible — there is nothing to port-scan

Tested as code with permissions attached to it

What you end up holding

A list of deviations to work through

A list of host-level findings

Attack paths, with evidence and the single step that breaks each one

These are complements. Posture tooling is how you keep the configuration honest between tests; the test is how you learn which deviations were load-bearing.

What is yours to test, and what is not

The shared responsibility line

The provider secures the infrastructure the cloud runs on. You are responsible for what you put on it: identity and access configuration, data and its exposure, network rules, operating systems on any instances you manage, and application code. A cloud penetration test lives entirely on your side of that line, and the further a workload moves toward managed and serverless, the more of the remaining risk is identity rather than infrastructure.

AWS

AWS states that customers may carry out security assessments or penetration tests of their own AWS infrastructure without prior approval for the services on its permitted list, which includes EC2, RDS, CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, ECS, Fargate, Lightsail, Elastic Beanstalk and others. Testing that includes command and control requires prior approval. Denial of service and simulated denial of service are prohibited, as are port, protocol and request flooding, DNS zone walking, hijacking or pharming via Route 53, S3 bucket takeover and subdomain takeover.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has not required pre-approval for penetration testing since 15 June 2017. Notification is no longer needed, but testers must comply with the Microsoft Cloud Unified Penetration Testing Rules of Engagement. Denial of service testing of any kind is prohibited, along with accessing resources you do not own, retrieving credentials that are not yours, network-intensive fuzzing, phishing Microsoft staff, and post-compromise activity against Microsoft online services beyond an initial proof of concept.

Google Cloud

Google's Cloud Security FAQ states plainly that customers planning to evaluate the security of their Cloud Platform infrastructure with penetration testing are not required to contact Google. Testing must still comply with the Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service, and must stay within your own projects without affecting other customers' applications.

Read the policy before every engagement

These policies change, and the permitted-service lists change more often than the headline rules do. Treat what you read here as orientation and the provider's current page as the authority. Whatever the policy allows, the rules of engagement you sign should still name the scope, the window and the escalation contact.

Where cloud findings actually come from

IAM, and the paths between roles

The dominant category. A role that can pass another role, a policy that allows updating its own permissions, a trust relationship that accepts a wider principal than intended. Individually each looks defensible; the finding is the chain from a low-privilege identity to an administrative one, and it is invisible unless someone walks it.

Exposed storage and data

Buckets and blobs readable by anyone, snapshots and disk images shared more broadly than intended, backups sitting outside the controls that protect the original. What matters is not the exposure itself but what was inside: credentials, tokens and configuration found in storage are how a low finding becomes a high one.

Server-side request forgery against instance metadata

A request the application makes on your behalf, pointed at the metadata endpoint, returning credentials attached to the workload. This is the classic bridge from an application flaw to cloud account access, and it is the reason application testing and cloud testing should not be bought as if they were unrelated.

Containers and Kubernetes

Over-permissive service accounts, workloads running as root, no network policy between namespaces, and an exposed control plane component. The interesting question is rarely whether a container can be escaped in theory: it is what the identity attached to that pod can do in the cloud account once someone is inside it.

The CI/CD pipeline

Build systems hold deployment credentials by definition, which makes them a target rather than a support system. Pull request triggers that run untrusted code, secrets readable in build logs, artefact registries that anyone can push to. A pipeline compromise is a production compromise with an audit trail that looks like a deploy.

Secrets sprawl

Keys in environment variables, in instance user data, in container images, in repository history. Rotation policies that exist on paper. This is unglamorous and it is consistently among the highest-yield things a tester looks for, because a valid credential removes the need for an exploit entirely.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need permission from my cloud provider?

For the three major providers, generally no, and this is the single most out-of-date belief in cloud security buying. AWS allows testing of its permitted services without prior approval, though command and control testing needs approval. Microsoft has not required pre-approval since June 2017, subject to its unified rules of engagement. Google states that customers testing their own Cloud Platform infrastructure are not required to contact them. Denial of service testing is prohibited by all three, and each publishes the authoritative current version of its own policy.

What is actually in scope under shared responsibility?

Everything you configured: identity and access policies, storage exposure, network rules and security groups, workloads and containers you run, application code, and the pipelines that deploy all of it. Not in scope: the provider's hypervisor, physical infrastructure, or the internals of a managed service. The practical consequence is that as you adopt more managed services, the proportion of your remaining risk that lives in identity configuration goes up rather than down.

How is cloud penetration testing different from CSPM?

A posture tool compares your configuration to a baseline and returns deviations. A penetration test takes those conditions and tries to reach something. The difference shows up in prioritization: a posture tool cannot tell you that this particular over-permissive role, combined with that particular exposed instance, reaches the customer database, and that is the sentence a remediation plan needs. Run the posture tool continuously; use testing to learn which of its findings were load-bearing.

Does cloud testing cover Kubernetes?

It should, and the scope needs saying out loud because managed and self-hosted clusters differ in what belongs to you. Testing covers RBAC and service account permissions, workload security context, network policy between namespaces, exposed control plane components, image provenance, and — most importantly — what the cloud identity attached to a pod can do once the tester is inside it. That last link is where a container finding becomes an account finding.

What access should we give the testers?

A read-only role for configuration review, plus at least one low-privilege identity to start from for the attack-path work. The read-only role makes the review complete; the low-privilege identity makes the escalation testing realistic. Some teams also ask for an unauthenticated external pass first, which is worth doing and answers a different question — what a stranger reaches — rather than replacing the authenticated work.

How often should cloud environments be tested?

Cloud configuration changes every time infrastructure code is merged, which for most teams is many times a week. An annual test describes an account that no longer exists. The realistic pattern is continuous posture monitoring, testing that runs against changes as they land, and a deeper periodic engagement for the paths that require a human to chain together.

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CEO & CTO, Pier

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Cloud penetration testing

For teams who moved fast and configured as they went