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As cloud services continue to enable new technologies and see massive adoption there is a need to extend the scope of penetration testing into public cloud systems and components. The process described here aims to provide the foundation for a public cloud penetration testing methodology and is designed for current and future technologies that are hosted on public cloud environments or services. In particular, this document focuses on penetration testing of applications and services hosted in the cloud. It addresses the methodological and knowledge gaps in security testing of information systems and applications in public cloud environments.

This work focuses on testing systems and services hosted in public cloud environments. This refers to customer-controlled or customer-managed systems and services. For example, a custom virtual machine, managed and controlled by the cloud customer, in an IaaS environment would be in-scope whereas the hypervisor of an IaaS environment that is controlled by the cloud service provider isn’t. As for testing hybrid clouds, this document does not cover the hybrid interface and on-premises environment.