CAPECattack pattern

CAPEC-593 Session Hijacking

Very High Official page ↗
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)

  • T1563 Remote Service Session Hijacking technique
  • T1550.001 Application Access Token sub-technique
  • T1185 Browser Session Hijacking technique

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)

  • CAPEC-105 HTTP Request Splitting attack pattern
  • CAPEC-273 HTTP Response Smuggling attack pattern
  • CAPEC-33 HTTP Request Smuggling attack pattern
  • CAPEC-34 HTTP Response Splitting attack pattern

Referenced by CAPEC · child of (4)

  • CAPEC-102 Session Sidejacking attack pattern
  • CAPEC-107 Cross Site Tracing attack pattern
  • CAPEC-60 Reusing Session IDs (aka Session Replay) attack pattern
  • CAPEC-61 Session Fixation attack pattern

Referenced by CWE · attack pattern (1)

  • CWE-287 Improper Authentication weakness