Containers

This post is to follow up some of the technical details for the talk I gave at the 2024 Red Team Summit. The talk itself covered the use of container registries and infiltration through CI/CD pipelines as a means of initial access and persistence. This post will cover some of the technical details and examples that I used in the talk.

The first thing to discuss is gaining initial access to a container registry. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most common is through the use of weak or leaked credentials. Once access is gained, the attacker can then upload a malicious image to the registry. This image can be used to gain access to the CI/CD pipeline and then to the production environment.

CI/CD pipelines exist in just about every company that does some kind of development. Some companies have more mature pipelines than others, but the rule still holds. Most companies with in house development have a Jenkins instance or some similar build orchestration software, code repositories, path to deployment, etc. Depending on your background you may be familiar with these environments to varying degrees. I started out doing somethin between running application servers and devops, maintaining deployment pipelines and helping developers troubleshoot issues. I even wrote my own share of code and deployed my own changes to a minor application that eventually went into production. This was done as an opportuntiy to get me more familiar with that side of things and I found the experience very valuable. Those experiences became invaluable when I went into red teaming and security research as I already had a baseline familiarity with these environments and how they worked, and more importantly, insight in how these environments could be exploited by an attacker.

The last year I’ve been busy working quite a bit with AWS. I’ve gone so far as to get my certification as the Associate Level as an AWS Architect. I accomplished this earlier in the year as well as renewing my Puppet Certification just recently for 2017. I may also be getting Docker certified.

Also related to AWS, I’ve recently discovered some infosec related resources on AWS from the offensive perspective. The first is Daniel Grzelak who has a blog on some of the possible way someone can back door an AWS account using AWS services. Another is a tookit called CS Suite which I haven’t had a chance to use extensively yet, but can help with auditing AWS security. AWS also provides some tools to do the same.

Now I’m sitting on a plane, heading back to my family.

I just got through with the RedHat Summit 2017 in Boston and I also visited some of my family while there. It was an intense 3-4 days.

I generally love Boston, and also Cambridge across the river. While I was there, I took a visit over to the MIT Press Bookstore, and bought a few books, including Grokking algorithms which was a book that I already had on my wishlist, but wasn’t one I could find in the store anywhere else. It was going to be my next Amazon purchase, but I was lucky enough to find it there. I also bought Tokyo Boogie-Woogie, and one other book. I also explored Chinatown and had my first hot pot, which was an awesome experience.