Defending Multi-Cloud Applications Against Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

Morgan Reece, Nidhi Rastogi, Theodore Lander, Josiah Dykstra, Sudip Mittal, Andy Sampson

Abstract: Multi-cloud applications have become ubiquitous in today's organizations. Multi-cloud applications are being deployed across cloud service provider platforms to deliver services to all aspects of business. With the expansive use of multi-cloud environments, security is at the forefront of concerns when deploying and managing access to multi-cloud applications and the expanded attack surface of these applications. Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in multi-cloud environments that expose privileged information to inevitable attack.In this paper we develop a multi-cloud victim web application deployed as component services. These services are deployed on different cloud service providers. Being deployed on the different cloud service providers expands the attack surface of the multi-cloud victim web application. Using the victim multi-cloud application, we demonstrate a man-in-the-middle attack showing the stealing of privileged credentials. Utilizing ParrotOS as the exploitation server, we demonstrate an attack on an application deployed across three cloud service providers: AWS, Azure, and Rackspace. Having successfully attacked the application, we then implement mitigations and verify the protection by attacking the protected application.