During a black-box assessment of a SaaS provider that hosts its web front-end on Amazon EC2, you observe an image-fetching feature that lets users supply an arbitrary URL. By pointing the parameter to http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/AppRole, the application responds with an AccessKeyId, SecretAccessKey, and SessionToken. Which statement best explains why this exposure represents a critical cloud-centric threat?
It only discloses the instance's kernel version, which could help local privilege escalation but poses no wider cloud risk.
Responses from the metadata service are restricted to the calling virtual machine and cannot be reused externally, limiting the impact to denial-of-service.
IMDSv1 requires a valid X-aws-ec2-metadata-token header for any request, so the exploit would fail outside the instance itself.
The metadata service reveals short-lived AWS keys that can be used through the AWS API with every permission granted to the instance role, enabling an attacker to pivot into other cloud resources.
The IP address 169.254.169.254 is the well-known endpoint for the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service v1 (IMDSv1). Because IMDSv1 does not require a session token, any process that can make HTTP requests from the instance-including a vulnerable server processing untrusted URLs-can retrieve the temporary security credentials attached to the instance's IAM role. Those credentials are valid AWS access keys that can be used from any network location (until they expire) to call the AWS API with all permissions the role allows, such as listing S3 buckets, spinning up new instances, or exfiltrating data. The exposure is therefore a cloud-specific privilege-escalation and pivot vector, not merely an information leak about the instance itself. Options claiming the data are unusable off-instance or that a token is required describe IMDSv2 behavior, not IMDSv1, and the kernel-version disclosure theory ignores the real risk of stolen cloud credentials.
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What is the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)?
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What are IAM Security Credentials, and how do they function?
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What is the difference between IMDSv1 and IMDSv2, and why is it important?
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What is IMDSv1 in AWS, and how does it differ from IMDSv2?
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What are IAM roles in AWS, and why are they important?
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Why is exposing AWS IAM role credentials a critical cloud security risk?
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