How can you use penetration testing to secure cloud computing?

Penetration testing (Pentesting) is a process used to evaluate the security posture of an environment by simulating real-world attacks. It helps to identify vulnerabilities and provide insights to help remediate these weaknesses.

Instead of your own on-premise systems, the implemented design infrastructure of cloud-based systems is unknown, although service providers declare how secure it is. Therefore, it is important to know how well your cloud server farm is segmented from others. In addition to the architectural aspect, software/websites that allow users to interact with their systems and services may create an additional attack surface, potentially granting attackers access to the administrative side. That's why some PCI compliant service providers, and even their regulatory bodies, still hesitate to move any pieces of their Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) into cloud-based systems.

The only way I'd say is pentest the cloud itself. Hypervisor breakouts make cloud providers scared. There is no such thing as security of the cloud itself. You can't secure cloud in the way it is designed. (If you want to know how to secure it read my patents).

Pen-testing, in the traditional sense, has limited value in a cloud environment, being limited both to the assets under your control & under the cloud terms of service unable to test the underlying fabric of the cloud platform. At best you can enumerate your own deployed running services, but if you consume the CSP’s services you may be contractually obliged NOT to test them in any invasive manner. A continuous assessment process (Nessus or similar) may provide info on patching & config risks in your deployment, but security of cloud services themselves must generally be taken on trust. Recent disclosures of successful attacks on Azure/M365 in particular, by Russian & Chinese state sponsored hackers suggest this trust might be misplaced.

Pentesting plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of cloud computing environments. By simulating real-world attacks and identifying vulnerabilities, this testing can help organizations make informed decisions about security measures and mitigate potential risks.

Pentesting can protect against data breaches. It can be performed by 1.Setting up a test environment which includes applications, databases and other required components. 2. Information gathering of the required organization's cloud applications and components that are within the scope of the pentest. 3. Organize a proper test plan to check the positive negatives of the vulnerabilities. 4. Execute pentest methodologies using the tools like metasploit framework, etc 5. Document the findings after completing all the tests with a detailed explanation, test results summary, remediation, etc 6. Provide a final report of the findings to the organization's senior management and relevant stakeholders. 7. Conduct retesting periodically.

Limited. It may help with “tick the box” compliance measures or standards, but are more likely to give a false sense of security than deliver real value.

Pentesting will identify the vulnerabilities at the earlier stage and help us do the remediation. It will provide improved security in a cloud computing environment. Pentesting will facilitate risk assessment and ensure compliance and integrity.

Difficulty in finding the vulnerabilities by traditional pentest methods may be a challenge to identify the risk. Also, performance & compliance issues could be a major challenge when it comes to legal considerations.

Pen-testing is of limited value in a Public Cloud environment. Whilst they are “generically” secure, and are thus suitable for many basic services, they are not “specifically” secure to meet high value needs (and in fact their terms of service do specifically bar such use). Pen-testing can’t fix that.