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Global Accelerated Learning • Est. 1999
Glossary Term Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)

Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary

What is Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)?

The Instance Metadata Service IMDS gives cloud VMs config and temporary credentials; IMDSv2 adds token-based requests to block SSRF credential theft.

Glossary > Cloud Security > Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)

Understanding Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)

The Instance Metadata Service IMDS is a cloud provider endpoint, reachable from within a virtual machine at a link-local address, that supplies instance configuration data and temporary credentials for the instance's attached role. Because it exposes credentials, IMDS is a frequent target of server-side request forgery attacks that trick an application into querying it. AWS introduced IMDSv2, which requires a session-oriented token-based request flow, to mitigate these SSRF-based credential theft attacks.

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