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 knowledge, and seize management of the cloud setting.
The assault approach has been codenamed ECScape by Candy Safety researcher Naor Haziz, who offered the findings at this time 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 get hold of the permissions of a better‑privileged container operating on the identical host.”
Amazon ECS is a fully-managed container orchestration service that permits customers to deploy, handle, and scale containerized purposes, whereas integrating with Amazon Net Providers (AWS) to run container workloads within the cloud.
The vulnerability recognized by Candy Safety basically permits for privilege escalation by permitting a low-privileged job 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 may assume the function of a extra privileged job. That is facilitated by profiting from a metadata service operating at 169.254.170[.]2 that exposes the momentary credentials related to the duty’s IAM function.
Whereas this strategy ensures that every job will get credentials for its IAM function and they’re delivered at runtime, a leak of the ECS agent’s id may allow an attacker to impersonate the agent and acquire credentials for any job on the host. Your complete sequence is as follows –
- Receive the host’s IAM function credentials (EC2 Occasion Function) in order to impersonate the agent
- Uncover the ECS management aircraft 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 Process 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 solid agent channel additionally stays stealthy,” Haziz stated. “Our malicious session mimics the agent’s anticipated conduct – 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 acquire each different job’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 is no such thing as a job isolation in EC2 and that “containers can doubtlessly 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 must deal with every container as doubtlessly compromiseable and rigorously constrain its blast radius,” Haziz stated. “AWS’s handy abstractions (job 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 robust because the mechanisms isolating them – mechanisms which may have refined 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 might have allowed an attacker to bypass maintainer evaluation 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 may use to hijack a sufferer’s Cloud Shell setting and doubtlessly 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 via a drive-by assault
- An assault approach referred to 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 permits an attacker with solely Storage Account entry to switch 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 acquire broader entry to cloud sources
- A scope vulnerability within the legacy AmazonGuardDutyFullAccess AWS managed coverage that might enable a full organizational takeover from a compromised member account by registering an arbitrary delegated administrator
- An assault approach that abuses Azure Arc for privilege escalation by leveraging the Azure Related Machine Useful resource Administrator function and as a persistence mechanism by establishing 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 achieve entry to each inside cloud property and on-premises networks
- A provide chain compromise vulnerability in Google Gerrit referred to as GerriScary that enabled unauthorized code submissions to at the very least 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 in the course of the code merge course of
- A Google Cloud Platform misconfiguration that uncovered the subnetworks used for member exchanges at Web Trade Factors (IXPs), thereby permitting attackers to doubtlessly abuse Google’s cloud infrastructure to achieve unauthorized entry to inside IXP LANs.
- An extension of a Google Cloud privilege escalation vulnerability referred to as ConfusedFunction that may be tailored to different cloud platforms like AWS and Azure utilizing AWS Lambda and Azure Capabilities, respectively, along with extending it to carry out setting enumeration
“The simplest mitigation technique to guard your setting from comparable risk actor conduct 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. “Make sure that all cloud providers and dependencies are updated with the newest safety patches. If legacy SAs are current, exchange them with least-privilege SAs.”