Research Blog

Introducing opinel: Scout2’s favorite tool 03 Aug 2015 – Loïc Simon With boto3 being stable and generally available1, NCC took the opportunity to migrate Scout2 and AWS-recipes to boto3. As part of that migration effort, we decided to publish the formerly-known-as AWSUtils repository – used by Scout2 and AWS-recipes – as a python package required […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. IAM user management strategy (part 2) 09 Jun 2015 – Loïc Simon The previous [IAM user management strategy] (/aws/2015/02/24/iam_user_management.html) post discussed how usage of IAM groups enables AWS administrators to consistently grant privileges and […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. iSEC audit of MediaWiki 21 Apr 2015 – Valentin Leon iSEC Partners is happy to announce the public release of our latest project with the Open Technology Fund: the review of Wikimedia Foundation’s MediaWiki. The Open […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. Work daily with enforced MFA-protected API access 03 Apr 2015 – Loïc Simon AWS Security Token Service The AWS Security Token Service (STS) is the gateway used to create sessions when MFA-protected API access […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity, and can be downloaded below. Use and enforce Multi-Factor Authentication 02 Apr 2015 – Loïc Simon What is Multi-Factor Authentication? When enabled, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) provides strong defense-in-depth against compromises of credentials. MFA-enabled users […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. iSEC reviews SecureDrop 23 Mar 2015 – Valentin Leon As part of our projects with the Open Technology Fund, such as the review of TrueCrypt, iSEC Partners audited Freedom of the Press’ SecureDrop. SecureDrop is an open-source […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity, and can be downloaded below. Recognizing and Preventing TOCTOU Whitepaper 03 Mar 2015 – Christopher Hacking Time-Of-Check-to-Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities have been known for decades, but are still frequently discovered in modern code. This diverse […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. IAM user management strategy 24 Feb 2015 – Loïc Simon Use IAM groups When granting privileges to IAM users, AWS account administrators should avoid use of user-specific policies. Instead, create groups whose name explicitly […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. Do not use your AWS root account 23 Feb 2015 – Loïc Simon What is the AWS root account? The AWS root account is the account that was used — or created — when […]

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity. Announcing the AWS blog post series 22 Feb 2015 – Loïc Simon Starting this month, iSEC Partners will start a series of blog posts related to AWS. The goal of these blog posts will […]