PowerZure – PowerShell Framework To Assess Azure Security

For a list of functions, their usage, and more, check out https://powerzure.readthedocs.io

What is PowerZure?

PowerZure is a PowerShell project created to assess and exploit resources within Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure. PowerZure was created out of the need for a framework that can both perform reconnaissance and exploitation of Azure, AzureAD, and the associated resources.

CLI vs. Portal

A common question is why use PowerZure or command line at all when you can just login to the Azure web portal?

This is a fair question and to be honest, you can accomplish 90% of the functionality in PowerZure through clicking around in the portal, however by using the Azure PowerShell modules, you can perform tasks programmatically that are tedious in the portal. E.g, listing the groups a user belongs to. In addition, the ability to programmatically upload exploits instead of tinkering around with the messy web UI. Finally, if you compromise a user who has used the PowerShell module for Azure before and are able to steal the accesstoken.json file, you can impersonate that user which effectively bypasses multi-factor authentication.

Why PowerShell?

While the offensive security industry has seen a decline in PowerShell usage due to the advancements of defensive products and solutions, this project does not contain any malicious code. PowerZure does not exploit bugs within Azure, it exploits misconfigurations.

C# was also explored for creating this project but there were two main problems:

1. There were at least four different APIs being used for the project. MSOL, Azure REST, Azure SDK, Graph.

2. The documentation for these APIs simply was too poor to continue. Entire methods missing, namespaces typo’d, and other problems begged the question of what advantage did C# give over PowerShell (Answer: none)

Realistically, there is zero reason to ever run PowerZure on a victim’s machine. Authentication is done by using an existing accesstoken.json file or by logging in via prompt when logging into Azure CLI.

Requirements

The “Az” Azure PowerShell module is the primary module used in PowerZure, as it handles most requests interacting with Azure resources. The Az module interacts using the Azure REST API.

The AzureAD PowerShell Module is also used and is for handling AzureAD requests. The AzureAD module uses the Microsoft Graph API.

Author

Author: Ryan Hausknecht (@haus3c)