TESTING-BASED PREVENTION OF MISCONFIGURATION THREATS IN AWS INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE

Abstract

Misconfigured cloud infrastructure has emerged as a prevalent and impactful threat vector in cybersecurity. In particular, organizations deploying services on Amazon Web Services (AWS) often face significant security risks due to incorrectly configured access controls, insufficient logging, weak network segmentation, and the absence of critical protections such as Web Application Firewalls (WAF). Despite the widespread adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, AWS CloudFormation) to enforce predictable, version-controlled deployments, these IaC configurations typically undergo little to no systematic security testing. Unlike application code—which routinely undergoes unit, integration, and security testing—infrastructure code is seldom tested beyond basic static analysis or post-deployment monitoring. As a result, critical security misconfigurations can remain undetected until they are exploited by attackers. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel approach termed "Infrastructure as Tested Code." By applying proven software testing techniques—such as test assertions and continuous integration workflows—to IaC, our framework enables pre-deployment validation of an AWS environment’s security posture. We develop and evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation that automates security checks for Terraform-defined AWS resources, focusing on key configurations including WAF rules, Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, S3 bucket permissions, and security group rules. This test suite is built with open-source tools (Chef InSpec and AWS SDKs) and runs within a CI/CD pipeline using LocalStack to emulate AWS services. Through this approach, developers and DevSecOps teams can detect and remediate misconfigurations early in the development lifecycle, long before infrastructure reaches a production environment. Our experimental evaluation shows that integrating automated security tests into the DevOps pipeline significantly strengthens cloud security and mitigates misconfiguration-driven vulnerabilities. Compared to traditional static analysis tools, our approach offers greater flexibility, supports environment-specific policies, and allows developers to codify custom, testable security assertions. Even a minimal test suite proved effective in catching high-risk misconfigurations that static checks overlooked. This paradigm complements existing cloud security tools (such as AWS Config, Checkov, and other policy-as-code frameworks) and can be seamlessly integrated into DevSecOps pipelines. Finally, the paper provides a detailed implementation guide, a real-world case study, and an analysis of practical trade-offs. We conclude that just as test-driven development improved software reliability, adopting a test-driven approach to infrastructure can become a critical strategy for proactively securing cloud environments. This work lays the groundwork for future research into formalizing security testing practices for IaC, benchmarking IaC security test coverage, and developing reusable libraries of security test assertions for AWS.