CAPECattack pattern
CAPEC-593 Session Hijacking
Very High
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- Abstraction
- Standard
- Status
- Stable
- Likelihood of attack
- High
- Typical severity
- Very High
- CAPEC version
- 3.9
Description
This type of attack involves an adversary that exploits weaknesses in an application's use of sessions in performing authentication. The adversary is able to steal or manipulate an active session and use it to gain unathorized access to the application.
Execution flow
1. [Explore] [Discover Existing Session Token] Through varrying means, an adversary will discover and store an existing session token for some other authenticated user session.
2. [Experiment] [Insert Found Session Token] The attacker attempts to insert a found session token into communication with the targeted application to confirm viability for exploitation.
3. [Exploit] [Session Token Exploitation] The attacker leverages the captured session token to interact with the targeted application in a malicious fashion, impersonating the victim.
Prerequisites
• An application that leverages sessions to perform authentication.
Skills required
• [Low] Exploiting a poorly protected identity token is a well understood attack with many helpful resources available.
Consequences
• Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability: Gain Privileges
Mitigations
• Properly encrypt and sign identity tokens in transit, and use industry standard session key generation mechanisms that utilize high amount of entropy to generate the session key. Many standard web and application servers will perform this task on your behalf. Utilize a session timeout for all sessions. If the user does not explicitly logout, terminate their session after this period of inactivity. If the user logs back in then a new session key should be generated.
Related
Att&ck technique · MITRE ATT&CK (3)
Child of · CAPEC (1)
- CAPEC-21 Exploitation of Trusted Identifiers attack pattern
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-287 Improper Authentication weakness
Referenced by CAPEC · can precede (4)
Referenced by CAPEC · child of (4)
Referenced by CWE · attack pattern (1)
- CWE-287 Improper Authentication weakness