Cloud Fox
Automates situational awareness and reconnaissance for cloud penetration testing on AWS, Azure and GCP.
External Tool
This open-source tool is maintained externally. View the source on GitHub to learn more or run it yourself.
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Use it free
Open the official tool or demo — no account needed.
Self-host it
Run the open-source version on your own infrastructure.
What is Cloud Fox?
CloudFox is an open-source command-line tool designed to help security professionals rapidly assess and map unfamiliar cloud environments during penetration tests. Developed under the MIT license with over 2,600 GitHub stars, it addresses the challenge of quickly identifying potential attack vectors in complex cloud infrastructures. The tool automates situational awareness by systematically analyzing cloud resource configurations, detecting misconfigurations, and uncovering hidden secrets across major providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Its primary users include ethical hackers, red-team members, and security auditors who need to evaluate cloud security postures without prior knowledge of the target environment. By streamlining the discovery process, CloudFox reduces the time required to identify exploitable paths, such as exposed storage buckets, misconfigured IAM roles, or hardcoded credentials in cloud-native services.
How it works
CloudFox is a CLI-based reconnaissance tool that automates the collection of cloud infrastructure data to enable rapid threat modeling. It focuses on AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, leveraging public API endpoints to gather information about resource deployments, network topologies, and security configurations. The tool's core purpose is to bridge the gap between cloud complexity and actionable security insights. By aggregating data from multiple providers, it helps security teams prioritize vulnerabilities and understand how attackers might exploit misconfigurations in hybrid or multi-cloud setups. CloudFox can enumerate AWS regions, count resources, and identify secrets in EC2 user data or environment variables. It maps cross-cloud dependencies, such as shared storage buckets or VPC peering connections, and highlights potential attack paths like exposed API keys or overly permissive IAM policies. The tool also detects unused resources, orphaned instances, and insecure access controls across all supported platforms.
How to use it
- 1Install CloudFox via Go (requires Go 1.18+), then run `cloudfox -t <provider>` to specify AWS, Azure, or GCP. 2. Authenticate using temporary credentials or API keys, ensuring environment variables like AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID are set. 3. Execute commands like `cloudfox list-resources` to inventory assets or `cloudfox find-secrets` to scan for hardcoded credentials. 4. Analyze output to prioritize vulnerabilities, such as misconfigured S3 buckets or open RDP ports on Azure VMs. Practical tips include using the `--format json` flag for machine-readable output, validating credentials with `cloudfox test-auth`, and updating to v1.17.0+ to avoid compatibility issues with AWS's API changes.
What it can do
- cloud pentesting tool
Use cases
Assumptions and limitations
Assumptions
- source: https://github.com/BishopFox/cloudfox
- license: MIT — free to use
- privacy: Self-hosted — you control your data
Limitations
- Offensive tool — authorized penetration testing and lab use only; unauthorized use is illegal.
- Requires manual updates to v1.17.0+ after AWS API format changes
- Relies on public API data, which may lack sensitive or internal configurations
- Does not support real-time monitoring or dynamic resource tracking
- Limited to infrastructure-as-code analysis; does not evaluate application-layer security
Understanding the result
Automates situational awareness and reconnaissance for cloud penetration testing on AWS, Azure and GCP.
Tool details
- Clearly flagged when a network request is needed.
- No account, no sign-up, and no tracking of your content.
- Powered by (MIT).
- Built with
- (BishopFox/cloudfox)
- License
- MIT
- Runs locally
- No — requires a network request
- Verification
- Not yet verified
- Input
- Query
- Output
- Text
Built with BishopFox/cloudfox. OpenToolVault provides the discovery and browser interface while crediting the original project maintainers.
- Built with
- License
- MIT
Open-source project
OpenToolVault is an independent directory. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by this project.
References
- / — GitHub Repository
Upstream project · GitHub
- MIT License
Upstream project
Frequently asked
What cloud providers does CloudFox support?
CloudFox natively supports AWS, Azure, and GCP through their public API endpoints. It can analyze resource inventories, network configurations, and security policies across these platforms, though it requires valid credentials for each provider's API access.
How does CloudFox handle authentication for different cloud providers?
Authentication is provider-specific: AWS uses environment variables like AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, Azure requires AZURE_CLIENT_ID and AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET, and GCP depends on GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS. CloudFox abstracts these details into a unified CLI interface but still necessitates valid credentials for each service.
How do I scan for secrets in EC2 userdata?
Run `cloudfox find-secrets --provider aws` to scan AWS EC2 instances. The tool parses userdata scripts, environment variables, and metadata endpoints to detect hardcoded credentials, API keys, or other sensitive data. Use `--output json` to integrate findings into security orchestration platforms.
How does CloudFox compare to AWS CLI or Azure CLI?
Unlike native CLI tools that focus on single-provider operations, CloudFox specializes in cross-cloud reconnaissance and vulnerability prioritization. It automates tasks like resource enumeration and secret detection that would require multiple CLI commands across providers. However, it lacks the granular administrative controls available in provider-specific tools.
What should I do if CloudFox fails with an AWS API error?
First, verify you're using v1.17.0+ to avoid compatibility issues with AWS's API format changes. Check credentials validity with `cloudfox test-auth --provider aws`. If errors persist, temporarily disable AWS integration via `--no-aws` and re-run the scan to isolate the issue.