AppSec California 2019

Serverless Technology (Functions as a Service) is fast becoming the next "big thing" in the world of distributed applications. Organizations are investing a great deal of resources in this technology as a force-multiplier, cost-saver and ops-simplification cure-all. Especially with widespread support from cloud vendors, this technology is going to only become more influential. However, like everything else, Serverless apps are subject to a a wide variety of attack possibilities, ranging from attacks against access control tech like Function Event Injection, JWTs, to NoSQL Injection, to exploits against the apps themselves (deserialization, etc) escalating privileges to other cloud component.

On the other hand GraphQL (API Query Language) is the natural companion to serverless apps, where traditional REST APIs are replaced with GraphQL to provide greater flexibility, greater query parameterization and speed. GraphQL is slowly negating the need for REST APIs from being developed. Combined with Serverless tech/Reactive Front-end frameworks, GraphQL is very powerful for distributed apps. However, GraphQL can be abused with a variety of attacks including but not limited to Injection Attacks, Nested Resource Exhaustion attacks, Authorization Flaws among others.  

This talk presents a red-team perspective of the various ways in which testers can discover and exploit serverless and/or GraphQL driven applications to compromise sensitive information, and gain a deeper foothold into database services, IAM services and other other cloud components. The talk will have some demos that will demonstrate practical attacks and attack possibilities against Serverless and GraphQL applications.