During a black-box assessment of a SaaS provider, you discover that virtual-machine disk images are stored in an object-storage bucket that grants READ access to the "Authenticated Users" group. Which cloud-computing threat does this misconfiguration mainly create, and what is the most likely impact on other tenants who use the same platform?
An insecure API threat that could let attackers steal service keys and hijack tenant accounts.
A denial-of-service threat in which unrestricted downloads saturate the provider's egress bandwidth, slowing other tenants.
A data-breach threat from overly permissive storage ACLs that lets any authenticated cloud user download all tenants' VM images.
A hypervisor-escape threat allowing one tenant's VM to execute code on the host and control neighboring VMs.
On platforms such as AWS and Google Cloud, the "Authenticated Users" (or "allAuthenticatedUsers") group includes any account that can sign in to the provider, not just the customer's own organization. Granting this group READ access therefore allows millions of unrelated cloud subscribers-though still authenticated-to download the content. Exposed VM images can then be inspected offline to recover hard-coded secrets, operating-system configurations, or licensed software. This is a classic data-breach risk caused by improper storage permission, one of the Cloud Security Alliance's top cloud-computing threats. The issue does not directly cause resource exhaustion, enable hypervisor escape, or exploit insecure APIs; its primary consequence is unauthorized disclosure of tenant data.
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What is the 'Authenticated Users' group in cloud platforms, and why is it risky?
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What is an ACL, and how does it relate to storage permissions in the cloud?
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What are VM disk images, and why is exposing them to 'Authenticated Users' dangerous?
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What is the 'Authenticated Users' group in cloud platforms?
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What are ACLs and how do they relate to cloud storage security?
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What is the Cloud Security Alliance, and what are its top cloud-computing threats?
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