Description

Identifies AWS Elastic Load Balancers configured with plain HTTP listeners in CloudFormation templates. Using unencrypted HTTP instead of HTTPS exposes traffic to potential interception and manipulation, compromising data security between clients and backend services.

Detection Strategy

• Look for CloudFormation resource elements of type 'AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer'

• Check the Listeners configuration within the LoadBalancer resource

• Report a vulnerability if any listener is configured to use the HTTP protocol (port 80) without SSL/TLS encryption

• Recommend using HTTPS (port 443) with SSL/TLS certificates instead

Vulnerable code example

Resources:
  MyLoadBalancer:
    Type: AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer
    Properties:
      AccessLoggingPolicy:
        Enabled: false  # Vulnerable: Access logging is disabled
        S3BucketName: logbucket
      Listeners:...

✅ Secure code example

Parameters:
  SSLCertificateArn:
    Type: String
    Description: ACM/IAM certificate ARN for HTTPS listeners

Resources:
  MyLoadBalancer:
    Type: AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer...