Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

With AWS access keys, there are two mandatory parts: the key id and the secret key. The format of the AWS access key is actually predictable, which is super interesting!

The first four characters are a prefix for the type of key. This depends if it's for a role, a certificate, a regular access key or something else.

After this, there is 16 bytes. If you base32 decode this you end up with 10 bytes. The account ID is encoded within the first 5 bytes of this but shifted by one bit. The author wrote a script that decodes the account given the key.

The rest of the 5 bytes is still unknown. I'm guessing it's random data to ensure that the key is unique.