How to avoid instance impersonation attacks with instance identity documents

An instance identity document is a JSON-formatted document that provides cryptographically verifiable information about your instance. The document contains details including instance ID, account ID, and instance type, which can be used to verify instance authenticity and guard against instance impersonation attacks such as the following:

• Instance ID spoofing: In this attack, the attacker compromises an EC2 instance and alters the instance ID to match that of a legitimate EC2 instance. The attacker then takes advantage of the spoofed instance ID to manipulate other AWS services such as CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) into treating the malicious EC2 instance as a legitimate one. By doing this, the attacker potentially gains unauthorized access to sensitive data or causes denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
• Unauthorized privilege escalation: There is a possibility that an attacker may attempt...