Create Attack Technique

Overview

Each attack technique is composed of two files, which should be stored in v2/internal/attacktechniques/<platform>/<mitre-attack-tactic>/<name> (e.g., v2/internal/attacktechniques/aws/defense-evasion/cloudtrail-delete/):

• main.go, containing the imperative attack logic
• most of the time, main.tf containing prerequisite infrastructure.

The lifecycle of an attack technique in Stratus Red Team is:

• COLD
• WARM: The prerequisite infrastructure is ready.
• DETONATED: The attack technique was detonated.

Guiding principles

• An attack technique should be granular, meaning that it should emulate a single step of an attack.
• Good: Share an EBS snapshot with an external AWS account.
• Bad: Use an IAM access key to perform privilege escalation, run discovery commands, take an EBS snapshot of an instance, share the EBS snapshot with an external AWS account.

• Techniques should emulate plausible and documented attacker behavior
• An attack technique should not be dependent on the state of the cloud environment it's run against.

Instructions

When creating a new technique, follow the workflow below step by step. When reviewing a PR or existing technique, use the guidelines below as a checklist to verify correctness and consistency.

Create the prerequisite infrastructure in the Terraform file

Provider versions and configurations to use

See references/provider-configs.md for the required Terraform provider blocks for each platform (AWS, Azure, Entra ID, GCP, Kubernetes).

When you're done, format your Terraform file using:

terraform fmt -write v2/internal/attacktechniques/<platform>/<tactic>/<name>/main.tf

Use of outputs

• Any outputs you defined will be passed to the Go file, which can consume them from the detonate and revert functions, e.g. params["output_name"].
• The value of the display output is displayed back to the user on the CLI. Example:

output "display" {
  value = format("%s Secrets Manager secrets ready", local.num_secrets)
}

Write the Go detonation code

Skeleton

See assets/sample-attack-technique.go

Guidelines for Go detonation code

• As much as possible, use the official cloud providers' Go SDK.
• For AWS, use the AWS SDK for Go v2.
• Leverage methods from the injected 'providers' objects to instantiate cloud providers' SDK. Examples below
• AWS CloudTrail: cloudtrail.NewFromConfig(providers.AWS().GetConnection())
• Azure Network: client, err := armnetwork.NewClientFactory(providers.Azure().SubscriptionID, providers.Azure().GetCredentials(), providers.Azure().ClientOptions)
• GCP IAM: service, err := iam.NewService(ctx, providers.GCP().Options())

Error handling

• Always return errors from detonate and revert — never use log.Fatalf().
• Use fmt.Errorf("failed to <action>: %w", err) for error wrapping.
• Log the operation being attempted before making the API call with log.Println.

Revert function

If the detonation is reversible, implement a revert function that undoes the changes made by detonate. This allows the technique to be cleaned up after use. The revert function has the same signature as detonate: func revert(params map[string]string, providers stratus.CloudProviders) error. See assets/sample-attack-technique.go for an example.

Guideline for documentation fields

• ID should always be of the form platform.mitre-attack-tactic.name, e.g. aws.defense-evasion.cloudtrail-delete
• FriendlyName should always start with a verb, and be in the infinitive form.
• Bad: S3 ransomware, Creates S3 ransomware
• Good: Simulate S3 ransomware
• Description should contain at least an intro sentence and a Warm-up, Detonation, References section. "References" should ideally be examples of usage/sightings of this technique in the wild, or relevant cloud provider documentation. Example:

Establishes persistence by creating a service account key on an existing service account.

Warm-up:

- Create a service account

Detonation:

- Create a new key for the service account

References:

- https://expel.com/blog/incident-report-spotting-an-attacker-in-gcp/
- https://rhinosecuritylabs.com/gcp/privilege-escalation-google-cloud-platform-part-1/

• Detection should describe how to detect this technique, including relevant CloudTrail/audit log event names and any managed detection rules (e.g. GuardDuty finding types). Use HTML for formatting since it renders in the docs. Example:

Identify when a CloudTrail trail is disabled, through CloudTrail's <code>StopLogging</code> event.

GuardDuty also provides a dedicated finding type, <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/guardduty/latest/ug/guardduty_finding-types-iam.html#stealth-iam-cloudtrailloggingdisabled">Stealth:IAMUser/CloudTrailLoggingDisabled</a>.

• IsIdempotent: set to true if the detonation can be called multiple times without side effects.

Add your new Go file to the imported attack techniques

Add a new import corresponding to your new Go file in v2/internal/attacktechniques/main.go.

Format your go code

Run:

cd v2 # if you're not already in there
go fmt ./...

Autogenerate docs

make docs

DON'T

• Don't persist anything in the Go detonation code. The revert and detonate methods are called in different runs, so they cannot use variables to share state.