Security Knowledge Base

Comprehensive documentation for security researchers and professionals

cloud-config

Security Researcher Detected: You might have ended up here because your site vulnerability scanner found something interesting. Hi! I'm a security engineer and I'm having a good time interacting with the people and bots that are interested in information security.

You will hopefully find this site is well-secured and I'm not interested in being hacked. I'm interested in learning about how people try to hack me, though.

What is this endpoint?

cloud-config

Cloud-init cloud-config file used to provision instances

What an attacker could do

Reveals cloud-init provisioning configuration including package lists, users, and any inline credentials, helping an attacker understand and reproduce the instance setup.

How to defend it

Keep provisioning data out of web-accessible paths, reference secrets from a secrets manager rather than inline, and enforce IMDSv2 to prevent SSRF retrieval of metadata.

Connect with the Security Engineer

Follow me on these platforms where I occasionally share interesting security insights and research.

Learn More

Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out the official documentation.

Read Official Documentation