Skip to content

Create an Access Key on an IAM User

Platform: AWS

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics

  • Persistence
  • Privilege Escalation

Description

Establishes persistence by creating an access key on an existing IAM user.

Warm-up:

  • Create an IAM user.

Detonation:

  • Create an IAM access key on the user.

References:

Instructions

Detonate with Stratus Red Team
stratus detonate aws.persistence.iam-backdoor-user

Detection

Through CloudTrail's CreateAccessKey event. This event can hardly be considered suspicious by itself, unless correlated with other indicators. '

Detonation logs new!

The following CloudTrail events are generated when this technique is detonated1:

  • iam:CreateAccessKey
View raw detonation logs 
[
   {
      "awsRegion": "ap-central-2r",
      "eventCategory": "Management",
      "eventID": "c64c4ded-ef03-4e5c-81eb-153b118d72f2",
      "eventName": "CreateAccessKey",
      "eventSource": "iam.amazonaws.com",
      "eventTime": "2024-07-30T21:53:13Z",
      "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
      "eventVersion": "1.09",
      "managementEvent": true,
      "readOnly": false,
      "recipientAccountId": "946986569305",
      "requestID": "1af58177-d743-4c94-ac1d-014721ed9b94",
      "requestParameters": {
         "userName": "stratus-red-team-backdoor-u-user"
      },
      "responseElements": {
         "accessKey": {
            "accessKeyId": "AKIAL80DWDVKKM0UXEER",
            "createDate": "Jul 30, 2024 9:53:13 PM",
            "status": "Active",
            "userName": "stratus-red-team-backdoor-u-user"
         }
      },
      "sourceIPAddress": "211.9.016.253",
      "tlsDetails": {
         "cipherSuite": "TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256",
         "clientProvidedHostHeader": "iam.amazonaws.com",
         "tlsVersion": "TLSv1.3"
      },
      "userAgent": "stratus-red-team_f3f19dcd-8552-47ca-a01e-0e1f5578d15e",
      "userIdentity": {
         "accessKeyId": "AKIA30BEZSJBVKOFKZW0",
         "accountId": "946986569305",
         "arn": "arn:aws:iam::946986569305:user/christophe",
         "principalId": "AIDAKYRO1QIPZ5M62HCS",
         "type": "IAMUser",
         "userName": "christophe"
      }
   }
]

  1. These logs have been gathered from a real detonation of this technique in a test environment using Grimoire, and anonymized using LogLicker. ↩