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Weaponizing SageMaker AI: Real-World Offense in Machine Learning Platforms

Shani Peled

Exploiting AWS SageMaker to gain persistence and exfiltrate data from ML platforms.

Summary

A cloud security researcher explores offensive tradecraft targeting machine learning infrastructure in the Cloud Village, focusing on Amazon SageMaker deployment flaws [00:05]. The talk examines how default "easy button" configurations and quick-start templates provision overly permissive IAM service roles behind convenient interfaces [03:53].

The presentation demonstrates step-by-step attack techniques executed from within compromised Jupyter notebook instances, including abusing wildcard permissions (`secretsmanager:ListSecrets`) to enumerate organizational secrets across the entire AWS account [07:44]. The researcher shows how attackers can map underlying Glue Data Catalogs and Athena table metadata to harvest sensitive training datasets [11:51], exploit subtle authorization boundaries between Amazon Cognito application identities and AWS IAM roles [15:56], and script automated enumeration routines to discover exploitable cloud privilege escalation paths [20:20].

(AI summary — Gemini Flash)

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