whoAMI: Discovering and exploiting a large-scale AMI name confusion attack
Seth Art
Cloud Village @ DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Cloud Village
In this compelling talk at Cloud Village, Seth Art, a Security Advocate and Researcher at DataDog, unveiled a significant security vulnerability dubbed "whoAMI" – a large-scale name confusion attack targeting Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This attack, which leverages insecure configurations in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools and AWS SDKs, has the potential to grant attackers remote code execution (RCE) within victim AWS accounts. Art's research highlights a critical supply chain risk where automated EC2 deployments, if not properly secured, can inadvertently pull and execute malicious AMIs published by adversaries.
AI review
Solid, well-scoped cloud security research with a clear novel contribution: Art didn't just rediscover an old AMI confusion concept, he traced exactly how a 2022 Terraform provider regression reopened a known-fixed vulnerability, then proved at scale it matters — including against AWS's own internal systems. The Cirrus CI exploitation with live credential exfiltration is the kind of concrete, reproducible impact that separates real research from blog-post security theater.