3 ms·

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

bigiain 11y 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.
- personjerry 11y ago
  I believe this comment is the most correct answer. Anything is theoretically "hackable" given enough time. What we can do is to make things difficult enough to hack that they are not worth the time.
mattkrea 11y 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.
- bigiain 11y ago
  I will say "Yes". With 100% certainty. Interesting people do stuff like this "for fun": http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/01/19/29c3-travis-goodspeed-writing-a-thumbdrive-from-scratch/ http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/01/19/29c3-travis-goodsp... and this: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack How much would you bet against the people described below having even better versions of those two hacks, and being fully aware of Amazon's supply chain? "The book included a photograph of intercepted packages being opened by NSA agents, and an accompanying NSA document explained the packages were “redirected to a secret location” where the agents implanted surveillance beacons that secretly communicated with NSA computers." - https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/core-secrets/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/core-secrets/
  - mattkrea 11y ago
    Haha, well if your threat model includes the government I'm fairly certain we're all screwed.
    - bigiain 11y ago
      Indeed. Having said that, I suspect in light of recent Snowden releases - it seems a bunch of German and Brazilian commercial businesses who probably didn't expect they had to consider the NSA as a plausible attacker are now having exactly those discussions. I suspect _any_ prudent CSO of any company who's commercial competitors include politically connected US companies is now wondering whether they also need to consider that risk.

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.

personjerry 11y ago
I believe this comment is the most correct answer. Anything is theoretically "hackable" given enough time. What we can do is to make things difficult enough to hack that they are not worth the time.

mattkrea 11y 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.

bigiain 11y ago
I will say "Yes". With 100% certainty. Interesting people do stuff like this "for fun": http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/01/19/29c3-travis-goodspeed-writing-a-thumbdrive-from-scratch/ http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/01/19/29c3-travis-goodsp... and this: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack How much would you bet against the people described below having even better versions of those two hacks, and being fully aware of Amazon's supply chain? "The book included a photograph of intercepted packages being opened by NSA agents, and an accompanying NSA document explained the packages were “redirected to a secret location” where the agents implanted surveillance beacons that secretly communicated with NSA computers." - https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/core-secrets/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/core-secrets/
- mattkrea 11y ago
  Haha, well if your threat model includes the government I'm fairly certain we're all screwed.
  - bigiain 11y ago
    Indeed. Having said that, I suspect in light of recent Snowden releases - it seems a bunch of German and Brazilian commercial businesses who probably didn't expect they had to consider the NSA as a plausible attacker are now having exactly those discussions. I suspect _any_ prudent CSO of any company who's commercial competitors include politically connected US companies is now wondering whether they also need to consider that risk.