How relevant is Grub password protection in the cloud?

Indigenuity

3/7/24, 9:02 PM

I see a recommendation from a vulnerability scanning tool running in AWS EC2, targeting an instance running Ubuntu 20.04:

GRUB bootloader is not password protected. An attacker can use the GRUB editor interface to change its configuration or to gather information using the cat command. It can also be exploited to boot into single user mode as root or boot into an insecure operating system.

Grub config with no password found. * Vulnerable file: /boot/grub/grub.cfg

How relevant is this concern in a cloud environment like AWS EC2? The way I see it, in order to take advantage of a no-password bootloader, the attacker would require:

root access on the instance to run update-grub and perform the steps required to even make Grub accessible via some means like the EC2 serial console
boot-time access to the instance using EC2 Serial Console.

For all practical purposes, if a person has the IAM permissions and OS-level permissions to do this, they already have access to do pretty much anything. Am I missing some aspect of this vulnerability that makes it a real issue?

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grub2

amazon-ec2

20.04

Elon Musk

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