CAPECattack pattern

CAPEC-586 Object Injection

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Abstraction
Meta
Status
Draft
Likelihood of attack
Medium
Typical severity
High
CAPEC version
3.9

Description

An adversary attempts to exploit an application by injecting additional, malicious content during its processing of serialized objects. Developers leverage serialization in order to convert data or state into a static, binary format for saving to disk or transferring over a network. These objects are then deserialized when needed to recover the data/state. By injecting a malformed object into a vulnerable application, an adversary can potentially compromise the application by manipulating the deserialization process. This can result in a number of unwanted outcomes, including remote code execution.

Prerequisites

• The target application must unserialize data before validation.

Consequences

• Availability: Resource Consumption • Integrity: Modify Data • Authorization: Execute Unauthorized Commands

Mitigations

• Implementation: Validate object before deserialization process • Design: Limit which types can be deserialized. • Implementation: Avoid having unnecessary types or gadgets available that can be leveraged for malicious ends. Use an allowlist of acceptable classes. • Implementation: Keep session state on the server, when possible.

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-502 Deserialization of Untrusted Data weakness

Referenced by CWE · attack pattern (1)

  • CWE-502 Deserialization of Untrusted Data weakness