Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated an “end-to-end privilege escalation chain” in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that may very well be exploited by an attacker to conduct lateral motion, entry delicate information, and seize management of the cloud setting.
The assault method has been codenamed ECScape by Candy Safety researcher Naor Haziz, who offered the findings right this moment on the Black Hat USA safety convention that is being held in Las Vegas.
“We recognized a technique to abuse an undocumented ECS inside protocol to seize AWS credentials belonging to different ECS duties on the identical EC2 occasion,” Haziz stated in a report shared with The Hacker Information. “A malicious container with a low‑privileged IAM [Identity and Access Management] function can receive the permissions of a better‑privileged container operating on the identical host.”
Amazon ECS is a fully-managed container orchestration service that enables customers to deploy, handle, and scale containerized functions, whereas integrating with Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) to run container workloads within the cloud.
The vulnerability recognized by Candy Safety primarily permits for privilege escalation by permitting a low-privileged activity operating on an ECS occasion to hijack the IAM privileges of a higher-privileged container on the identical EC2 machine by stealing its credentials.
In different phrases, a malicious app in an ECS cluster might assume the function of a extra privileged activity. That is facilitated by benefiting from a metadata service operating at 169.254.170[.]2 that exposes the non permanent credentials related to the duty’s IAM function.
Whereas this strategy ensures that every activity will get credentials for its IAM function and they’re delivered at runtime, a leak of the ECS agent’s id might allow an attacker to impersonate the agent and procure credentials for any activity on the host. The complete sequence is as follows –
- Receive the host’s IAM function credentials (EC2 Occasion Position) in order to impersonate the agent
- Uncover the ECS management airplane endpoint that the agent talks to
- Collect the required identifiers (cluster title/ARN, container occasion ARN, Agent model data, Docker model, ACS protocol model, and Sequence quantity) to authenticate because the agent utilizing the Activity Metadata endpoint and ECS introspection API
- Forge and signal the Agent Communication Service (ACS) WebSocket Request impersonating the agent with the sendCredentials parameter set to “true”
- Harvest credentials for all operating duties on that occasion
“The cast agent channel additionally stays stealthy,” Haziz stated. “Our malicious session mimics the agent’s anticipated habits – acknowledging messages, incrementing sequence numbers, sending heartbeats – so nothing appears amiss.”
“By impersonating the agent’s upstream connection, ECScape utterly collapses that belief mannequin: one compromised container can passively gather each different activity’s IAM function credentials on the identical EC2 occasion and instantly act with these privileges.”
ECScape can have extreme penalties when operating ECS duties on shared EC2 hosts, because it opens the door to cross-task privilege escalation, secrets and techniques publicity, and metadata exfiltration.
Following accountable disclosure, Amazon has emphasised the necessity for purchasers to undertake stronger isolation fashions the place relevant, and make it clear in its documentation that there isn’t any activity isolation in EC2 and that “containers can probably entry credentials for different duties on the identical container occasion.”
As mitigations, it is suggested to keep away from deploying high-privilege duties alongside untrusted or low-privilege duties on the identical occasion, use AWS Fargate for true isolation, disable or prohibit the occasion metadata service (IMDS) entry for duties, restrict ECS agent permissions, and arrange CloudTrail alerts to detect uncommon utilization of IAM roles.
“The core lesson is that you need to deal with every container as probably compromiseable and rigorously constrain its blast radius,” Haziz stated. “AWS’s handy abstractions (activity roles, metadata service, and so on.) make life simpler for builders, however when a number of duties with completely different privilege ranges share an underlying host, their safety is just as sturdy because the mechanisms isolating them – mechanisms which may have delicate weaknesses.”
The event comes within the wake of a number of cloud-related safety weaknesses which were reported in current weeks –
- A race situation in Google Cloud Construct’s GitHub integration that would have allowed an attacker to bypass maintainer assessment and construct un-reviewed code after a “/gcbrun” command is issued by the maintainer
- A distant code execution vulnerability in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Code Editor that an attacker might use to hijack a sufferer’s Cloud Shell setting and probably pivot throughout OCI providers by tricking a sufferer, already logged into Oracle Cloud, to go to a malicious HTML web page hosted on a server by the use of a drive-by assault
- An assault method known as I SPy that exploits a Microsoft first-party utility’s Service principal (SP) in Entra ID for persistence and privilege escalation through federated authentication
- A privilege escalation vulnerability within the Azure Machine Studying service that enables an attacker with solely Storage Account entry to change invoker scripts saved within the AML storage account and execute arbitrary code inside an AML pipeline, enabling them to extract secrets and techniques from Azure Key Vaults, escalate privileges, and achieve broader entry to cloud assets
- A scope vulnerability within the legacy AmazonGuardDutyFullAccess AWS managed coverage that would enable a full organizational takeover from a compromised member account by registering an arbitrary delegated administrator
- An assault method that abuses Azure Arc for privilege escalation by leveraging the Azure Linked Machine Useful resource Administrator function and as a persistence mechanism by organising as command-and-control (C2)
- A case of over-privileged Azure built-in Reader roles and a vulnerability in Azure API that may very well be chained by an attacker to leak VPN keys after which use the important thing to realize entry to each inside cloud property and on-premises networks
- A provide chain compromise vulnerability in Google Gerrit known as GerriScary that enabled unauthorized code submissions to a minimum of 18 Google tasks, together with ChromiumOS (CVE-2025-1568, CVSS rating: 8.8), Chromium, Dart, and Bazel, by exploiting misconfigurations within the default “addPatchSet” permission, the voting system’s label dealing with, and a race situation with bot code-submission timings through the code merge course of
- A Google Cloud Platform misconfiguration that uncovered the subnetworks used for member exchanges at Web Alternate Factors (IXPs), thereby permitting attackers to probably abuse Google’s cloud infrastructure to realize unauthorized entry to inside IXP LANs.
- An extension of a Google Cloud privilege escalation vulnerability known as ConfusedFunction that may be tailored to different cloud platforms like AWS and Azure utilizing AWS Lambda and Azure Features, respectively, along with extending it to carry out setting enumeration
“The simplest mitigation technique to guard your setting from comparable risk actor habits is to make sure that all SAs [Service Account] inside your cloud setting adhere to the precept of least privilege and that no legacy cloud SAs are nonetheless in use,” Talos stated. “Be sure that all cloud providers and dependencies are updated with the most recent safety patches. If legacy SAs are current, change them with least-privilege SAs.”
