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Skyfall: deep dive

A fast-growing AI company with an Arceus cloud environment held together by assumptions. Break in, escalate, and decide how the story ends.

ILIAS is a rapidly growing AI scale-up that made the decisions every engineering team under pressure makes: move fast, ship often, clean up later. In Skyfall, you exploit the consequences. Starting from nothing more than a public-facing sign-up page, you will discover that a simple account places you inside ILIAS's internal Arceus cloud tenant. From there, you will find SSH credentials leaking from Arceus Lens debug logs, pivot through a deployment VM by querying the metadata service, crack open a secrets vault using the Arceus CLI, escalate to full directory ownership through a service principal, and face a final choice: clean up quietly or let the entire environment collapse under runaway costs.

Why it hits hard

Cloud misconfigurations are not edge cases. They are the most common cause of large-scale data breaches in modern infrastructure. Capital One lost 100 million records to an IAM misconfiguration. Misconfigured storage buckets have leaked data from governments, hospitals, and Fortune 500 companies. Skyfall makes you walk the exact path an attacker would, from a misconfigured sign-up flow to full infrastructure compromise, one overlooked default at a time. You run real CLI commands against a live Arceus environment, not a quiz or a simulation. Every command maps to an actual Azure or AWS equivalent. After this track, you will never look at a cloud console the same way again.

What you'll breach

Skyfall puts you inside Arceus, a live cloud platform that mirrors the misconfigurations behind real-world breaches like the 2019 Capital One incident, where a single misconfigured IAM role exposed over 100 million customer records in S3.

You start with a regular sign-up. Within minutes, you discover that the provisioning process has placed you inside ILIAS's production Arceus tenant. From the Arceus Lens log viewer, you find that production monitoring is streaming DEBUG-level output that includes SSH credentials in plain text. Those credentials get you into a deployment VM. A single curl to the metadata service at 169.212.169.212 hands you managed identity tokens. Using the Arceus CLI, you discover a secrets vault, assign VaultReader to your identity, and extract the stored secret. It maps to the DevAI Automation Engine, ILIAS's core AI automation product, whose service principal was granted elevated permissions to keep their pipelines running. You log in as that principal and escalate to directory Owner.

Then you choose. Clean Exit: delete the prohibited data ILIAS never should have stored, including voice clones, user tracking recordings, and robocopy models. Or trigger Skyfall: strip roles from development and management groups, scale every web app and container to maximum, and watch the projected monthly cost explode.

Challenges

From sign-up page to infrastructure owner.

Seven challenges inside Arceus, a fictional cloud platform. Every command you run is a real cloud attack technique.

7 challengesFull terminal experience2 endings

ILIAS left their monitoring tool in DEBUG mode. Arceus Lens, the platform's log viewer, is streaming SSH credentials in plain text between routine log entries. Find them before they rotate. Verbose logging leaks like this are behind some of the largest cloud breaches on record.

SSH into the deployment VM, then curl to extract managed identity tokens from the instance metadata service. This is the same technique used in the Capital One breach of 2019, where a misconfigured WAF allowed SSRF to the EC2 metadata endpoint and exposed over 100 million records.

Use the Arceus CLI to discover a secrets vault, assign VaultReader to your managed identity, extract the stored secret, and map it to the DevAI Automation Engine service principal. Then log in as that principal and escalate to directory Owner. This mirrors real IAM privilege escalation chains documented by Rhino Security Labs and others.

Clean Exit: delete the prohibited data ILIAS should never have stored, from voice clones to user tracking recordings and robocopy models. Or trigger Skyfall: strip roles from every dev and management group, scale all web apps and containers to maximum, and calculate the projected monthly cost catastrophe. Your call.

Attack chain

Misconfigured access

Create a regular account on the platform and discover that the sign-up process places you inside a cloud tenant you were never supposed to reach.

Credential extraction

Open the Arceus Lens log viewer and discover that the production monitoring resource is streaming DEBUG-level output. SSH credentials appear in plain text between routine log entries.

Infrastructure pivot

SSH into the deployment VM with the leaked credentials. Then curl the metadata service at 169.212.169.212 to extract the managed identity's client ID and access token. Use the Arceus CLI to authenticate and discover resources across the environment.

Privilege escalation

Assign the VaultReader role to the VM's managed identity, extract the stored secret, and match it to the DevAI Automation Engine service principal. Log in as that principal and escalate your permissions to directory Owner.

Final choice

Choose your ending. Clean Exit: delete the prohibited data ILIAS should never have stored, including voice clones, user tracking recordings, and robocopy models. Or trigger Skyfall: strip roles from every team, scale all web apps and containers to maximum, and watch the projected monthly cost explode.

OWASP Top 10 (2025) coverage

A01Broken Access Control
  • Discover that a public sign-up flow assigns users to ILIAS's internal Arceus cloud tenant, granting access to infrastructure meant only for employees.
  • Query the deployment VM's metadata service to retrieve managed identity tokens for resources the identity was never intended to reach.
  • Map a vault secret to the DevAI Automation Engine service principal and escalate from external user to full directory Owner in a single role assignment.
A02Security Misconfiguration
  • Extract SSH credentials from Arceus Lens debug logs that production monitoring was never configured to suppress.
  • Use the Arceus CLI to assign VaultReader to a VM's managed identity, granting yourself access to secrets that include service principal credentials.
  • Scale cloud resources to their maximum limits as a demonstration of how unrestricted resource policies enable cost-based denial of service.