Description

Cloud Console Cartographer is an open-source tool designed to simplify the analysis of AWS console logs by mapping noisy log activity into consolidated, succinct events. This tool helps security practitioners cut through the noise and better understand console behavior in their environment. Daniel Bohannon, Principal Threat Researcher at Permiso, explained, “Infrastructure as code has replaced a lot of the need for console access for many organizations, but there are still plenty of instances where the console is still being used, and in some cases, you need to use the AWS console to perform certain actions.” When users access the AWS console and perform actions like navigating to IAM ? Users, a single action can generate over 300 CloudTrail events. These events represent API calls that populate what is displayed within the user interface. However, a single console session can generate far more events than the actual user inputs or actions. This can lead to confusion when reviewing logs, as events may appear that the user did not explicitly trigger. Cloud Console Cartographer addresses this challenge by processing raw log events and grouping related events into singular actions. For example, it can group a series of 17 events in CloudTrail triggered by a user clicking a particular button in the UI. Additionally, the tool parses additional data from these secondary events to provide more context about the user's activity, such as the names of groups, policies, roles, or access keys that were active at the time of the action. This correlation and reduction of events into singular actions help security teams quickly understand the activity conducted in the console, simplifying the analysis process. Threat actors leveraging console and other UIs have been observed exploiting the confusion in log data, making it difficult for incident responders and blue teamers to differentiate between user-invoked API calls and secondary API invocations. Cloud Console Cartographer aims to mitigate this challenge and provide security professionals with clearer insights into AWS console activity.