Cloud Console Cartographer: Mapping the Cloud for Defenders

Cloud Console Cartographer

Released at Black Hat Asia on April 18, 2024, Cloud Console Cartographer is a framework for condensing groupings of cloud events (e.g. CloudTrail logs) and mapping them to the original user input actions in the management console UI for simplified analysis and explainability. This is extremely beneficial for defenders since numerous input actions in management console sessions can generate 10’s and even many 100’s of events originating from a single interactive click by the end user.

An additional capability that Cloud Console Cartographer provides defenders is the parsing of relevant data from all events related to each mapping. For example, when a user clicks on IAM->Users in the AWS Management Console and 100+ events are generated, this framework parses these logs and extracts all IAM users and long-lived access keys that were active at the time the logs were generated. This leads to point-in-time context of the environment and increased levels of visibility into what the user was seeing in the UI at the time of their activity.

An example of this IAM->Users scenario is shown below:

Lastly, what framework would be complete without some ASCII art:

This tool offers a CLI (Command Line Interface) for processing cloud logs and simple displaying of results on the command line. More interactive analysis is better served using the Python UI Visualizer. Let’s review its most common use cases:

Use the demo CloudTrail session stored in ./Demo to quickly see the power of the framework’s aggregation and enhanced explainability, though as later examples will show logs can be piped into this framework’s functions without requiring anything being written to disk.

First invoke Add-Signal to apply Labels and to perform Signal/mapping evaluation. Then pass these results to one of many output functions.

Run command:

dir ./Demo/InputEvents.json | Add-Signal -Verbose | Show-EventSummary -Detail signal

aws cloudtrail lookup-events –lookup-attributes AttributeKey=AccessKeyId,AttributeValue=ASIAPERSHENDETJEMIQ1 | Add-Signal | Show-SessionSummary

cat ./Demo/InputEvents.json | Add-Signal | Show-SessionSummaryUI

Install