CAPECattack pattern
CAPEC-212 Functionality Misuse
Medium
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- Abstraction
- Meta
- Status
- Stable
- Likelihood of attack
- Medium
- Typical severity
- Medium
- CAPEC version
- 3.9
Description
An adversary leverages a legitimate capability of an application in such a way as to achieve a negative technical impact. The system functionality is not altered or modified but used in a way that was not intended. This is often accomplished through the overuse of a specific functionality or by leveraging functionality with design flaws that enables the adversary to gain access to unauthorized, sensitive data.
Prerequisites
• The adversary has the capability to interact with the application directly.The target system does not adequately implement safeguards to prevent misuse of authorized actions/processes.
Skills required
• [Low] General computer knowledge about how applications are launched, how they interact with input/output, and how they are configured.
Consequences
• Confidentiality: Gain Privileges
• Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability: Other
Mitigations
• Perform comprehensive threat modeling, a process of identifying, evaluating, and mitigating potential threats to the application. This effort can help reveal potentially obscure application functionality that can be manipulated for malicious purposes.
• When implementing security features, consider how they can be misused and compromised.
Related
Weakness · CWE (3)
Referenced by CAPEC · child of (6)
- CAPEC-111 JSON Hijacking (aka JavaScript Hijacking) attack pattern
- CAPEC-2 Inducing Account Lockout attack pattern
- CAPEC-48 Passing Local Filenames to Functions That Expect a URL attack pattern
- CAPEC-50 Password Recovery Exploitation attack pattern
- CAPEC-620 Drop Encryption Level attack pattern
- CAPEC-682 Exploitation of Firmware or ROM Code with Unpatchable Vulnerabilities attack pattern
Referenced by CAPEC · peer of (1)
- CAPEC-663 Exploitation of Transient Instruction Execution attack pattern