More production workloads live in AWS than in any other cloud — and so do more breach headlines. Almost none of those breaches start with Amazon’s infrastructure failing. They start with how the customer configured it: a public S3 bucket, an over-permissioned IAM role, a leaked access key. AWS penetration testing exists to find exactly those problems before someone else does. Here’s how it works, what’s allowed, and what a good test covers.
Do you need Amazon’s permission to run a pentest?
Mostly, no — and this surprises people. Under AWS’s shared-responsibility model, you’re free to run security testing against your own workloads without pre-approval for the common services: EC2 instances, NAT gateways, load balancers, RDS, CloudFront, Aurora, API Gateway, Lambda, Lightsail, and Elastic Beanstalk environments.
What’s prohibited regardless of ownership: denial-of-service attacks (even simulated), DNS zone walking via Route 53, request flooding, and anything targeting AWS infrastructure itself rather than your workloads on it. Activities like red-team-style simulated phishing of your own staff fall under separate AWS policy and may need coordination.
The practical takeaway: a properly scoped AWS penetration test needs no paperwork with Amazon — it needs a tester who knows where the policy lines are.
The shared responsibility model, in one paragraph
AWS secures the cloud; you secure what you put in it. Amazon patches the hypervisor and guards the data centers — nobody pentests their way into that. Your side of the line is identities and permissions, network exposure, storage configuration, secrets handling, and application code. That’s the attack surface, and it’s where essentially all real-world cloud breaches happen.
What an AWS penetration test actually covers
IAM: the cloud’s real perimeter
In AWS, identity is the network. Most serious cloud compromises are privilege-escalation chains through IAM: a low-value credential leads to a role with `iam:PassRole
Written by
Invadel Team
Senior penetration testers writing from real engagements — the same team that scopes, tests, and reports for our clients. About Invadel →