AWS Cognito Unauthenticated Identity Pool Credentials Issued

Description

Identifies AWS CloudTrail data events where an unauthenticated identity successfully retrieves temporary AWS credentials from a Cognito Identity Pool via GetCredentialsForIdentity. Cognito Identity Pools can be configured to allow unauthenticated (guest) access, intended for scenarios like anonymous app analytics, but a pool that grants those anonymous identities meaningful IAM permissions becomes a public, unauthenticated path to real AWS credentials. Adversaries who discover an identity pool ID (often embedded in mobile app binaries, web app JavaScript, or public source repositories) can call GetId followed by GetCredentialsForIdentity with no login token at all to obtain temporary credentials, then use them to access whatever the pool's unauthenticated role permits. This is a New Terms rule that limits alerting to identity pools that have not been observed issuing credentials to an unauthenticated caller before, since some applications intentionally and continuously use guest access as part of normal operation.

Detection logic

Its licence does not clear it for publishing here

Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.

Detection requirements

Platform: Containers ESXi IaaS Identity Provider Linux macOS Network Devices Office Suite SaaS Windows
The rule states no platform. This is derived from the 2 ATT&CK techniques it maps to.
Log source category: event_index

Known benign triggers

Applications that intentionally allow unauthenticated Identity Pool access for legitimate purposes (for example, anonymous usage analytics or unauthenticated content delivery) will trigger this rule the first time that pattern is observed for a given identity pool. Confirm whether the pool's unauthenticated role grants only the minimal permissions the application actually needs, and treat repeated alerts for the same pool as expected once validated.

References

Links the source published beside this detection. Reference is the link the source wrote, unmodified. Class is decided by this catalogue from the host and path, not stated by the source. Cited by counts published detections citing the same resource, including this one, and the sources beneath it count the repositories this catalogue ingests, which is not the same as independent research.
Reference	Class	Cited by
docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/identity-pool-roles.html	Product documentation	Only this detection cites it
docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/logging-using-cloudtrail.html	Product documentation	Only this detection cites it
github.com/RhinoSecurityLabs/pacu/tree/master/pacu/modules/cognito__attack	Tool	Only this detection cites it
hackingthe.cloud/aws/exploitation/cognito_identity_pool_excessive_privileges/	Unclassified	Only this detection cites it

Detection rules

AWS Cognito Unauthenticated Identity Pool Credentials Issued

Description

Detection logic

Detection requirements

Known benign triggers

MITRE ATT&CK mappings

References

From the source

Licence

Authorship

Detection rules