There are legitimate reasons to make a snapshot publicly available, such as to use EC2 to verify bugs in open source software. Snapshots are an effective way to replicate data and applications, so AWS made them easy to share across accounts through either controlled or open access. That makes snapshots a useful tool, as well as a serious Amazon EBS security risk if it falls into the wrong hands. They have the necessary block-level data and metadata to clone a new EBS volume for backup, disaster recovery or nondisruptive testing of an EC2 instance. Amazon EBS security risks and snapshot basicsĮBS snapshots are copies of virtual volumes that provide incremental backups of all blocks that have changed since the previous snapshot. For that reason, it's critical to be mindful of snapshot access controls for overall Amazon EBS security. However, snapshot sharing can create problems if users allow open access to the general public. It's a straightforward way to preserve EC2 state, clone a machine for testing and share EBS volumes with unmodified content. Elastic Block Store, a virtual disk volume for EC2 instances, includes a snapshot feature that creates a bit-for-bit replica of the data on a volume at a set point in time.

Bit replica