{"paper":{"title":"CLOUDBURST: Cloud-Layer Observations Using Beacons for Unified Real-time Surveillance and Threat Attribution","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"IAM Canary Roles achieve the highest Cloud Attribution Score for surveillance and threat attribution in cloud environments.","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CR","authors_text":"Abraham Itzhak Weinberg","submitted_at":"2026-05-13T04:14:21Z","abstract_excerpt":"Modern cloud-native environments present a fundamentally different exfiltration threat surface than traditional file-based scenarios. Attackers targeting AWS, GCP, Azure, and OCI steal S3 presigned URLs, container images, Kubernetes secrets, Terraform state modules, and IAM role tokens -- artefacts that existing honeytoken and beacon frameworks do not address. We present \\textbf{CLOUDBURST}, the first formal taxonomy and measurement framework for cloud-native passive beacons, comprising six vector classes across four major cloud providers.\n  We introduce the \\textit{Cloud Attribution Score} (C"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"IAM Canary Roles achieve the highest CAS (mean 0.450) and Detection Resistance (DR = 0.873), making them the most deployable vector; S3 Presigned URLs achieve the highest detection resistance (DR = 0.890) surviving all three cloud-native scanner models.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"The 205 simulated callbacks and three attacker sophistication levels accurately represent real-world attacker behavior and the detection capabilities of commercial cloud scanners such as AWS Macie and Prisma Cloud.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"CLOUDBURST defines the first formal taxonomy for cloud passive beacons and a CAS metric, finding IAM roles most effective while showing rapid attribution decay from infrastructure churn.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"IAM Canary Roles achieve the highest Cloud Attribution Score for surveillance and threat attribution in cloud environments.","source":"verdict.pith_extraction.headline","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C4","attestation":"unclaimed"}],"snapshot_sha256":"036417b0f9b787b67b30c03fc462c7afca1432547ba9f9043fca66906946d0e0"},"source":{"id":"2605.12976","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":"a8d71d64-f852-4e4f-b904-764a953ab141","model_set":{"reader":"grok-4.3"},"created_at":"2026-05-14T18:28:39.833813Z","strongest_claim":"IAM Canary Roles achieve the highest CAS (mean 0.450) and Detection Resistance (DR = 0.873), making them the most deployable vector; S3 Presigned URLs achieve the highest detection resistance (DR = 0.890) surviving all three cloud-native scanner models.","one_line_summary":"CLOUDBURST defines the first formal taxonomy for cloud passive beacons and a CAS metric, finding IAM roles most effective while showing rapid attribution decay from infrastructure churn.","pipeline_version":"pith-pipeline@v0.9.0","weakest_assumption":"The 205 simulated callbacks and three attacker sophistication levels accurately represent real-world attacker behavior and the detection capabilities of commercial cloud scanners such as AWS Macie and Prisma Cloud.","pith_extraction_headline":"IAM Canary Roles achieve the highest Cloud Attribution Score for surveillance and threat attribution in cloud environments."},"references":{"count":17,"sample":[{"doi":"","year":2025,"title":"Evaluating advanced cybersecurity technologies for cloud environments, 2025","work_id":"ab5396ee-0ac4-4556-b2c0-8a894f430cc2","ref_index":1,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2025,"title":"Cyber deception: Taxonomy, state of the art, frameworks, trends, and open challenges.IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2025","work_id":"c1246a10-1f46-4d99-a59c-7214639c08be","ref_index":2,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2023,"title":"Securing your network with honey- pot, canerytokens and docker on aws","work_id":"08e19675-fe14-4aa3-ab00-02f5e6b9bc82","ref_index":3,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2022,"title":"Loris Degioanni and Leonardo Grasso.Practical Cloud Native Security with Falco. \" O’Reilly Media, Inc.\", 2022","work_id":"28d2ffa3-45e5-4132-9d8e-0674368dd617","ref_index":4,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2024,"title":"Verizon 2024 data breach investigations report.The Verizon DBIR Team","work_id":"42c32b55-1487-44ec-86e0-04b257909725","ref_index":5,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false}],"resolved_work":17,"snapshot_sha256":"8a6c864514c8bbb2363ebd8ac2c119bc95e6b7efe492e9f0f47f1cd8003109d0","internal_anchors":2},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}