CAPECattack pattern

CAPEC-96 Block Access to Libraries

Medium Official page ↗
Abstraction
Detailed
Status
Draft
Likelihood of attack
Medium
Typical severity
Medium
CAPEC version
3.9

Description

An application typically makes calls to functions that are a part of libraries external to the application. These libraries may be part of the operating system or they may be third party libraries. It is possible that the application does not handle situations properly where access to these libraries has been blocked. Depending on the error handling within the application, blocked access to libraries may leave the system in an insecure state that could be leveraged by an attacker.

Execution flow

1. [Explore] Determine what external libraries the application accesses. 2. [Experiment] Block access to the external libraries accessed by the application. 3. [Experiment] Monitor the behavior of the system to see if it goes into an insecure/inconsistent state. 4. [Experiment] If the system does go into an insecure/inconsistent state, leverage that to obtain information about the system functionality or data, elevate access control, etc. The rest of this attack will depend on the context and the desired goal.

Prerequisites

• An application requires access to external libraries. • An attacker has the privileges to block application access to external libraries.

Skills required

• [Low] Knowledge of how to block access to libraries, as well as knowledge of how to leverage the resulting state of the application based on the failed call.

Consequences

• Availability: Alter Execution Logic • Confidentiality: Other • Confidentiality, Access Control, Authorization: Bypass Protection Mechanism

Mitigations

• Ensure that application handles situations where access to APIs in external libraries is not available securely. If the application cannot continue its execution safely it should fail in a consistent and secure fashion.

Related

Child of · CAPEC (1)

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-589 Call to Non-ubiquitous API weakness

Referenced by CWE · attack pattern (1)

  • CWE-589 Call to Non-ubiquitous API weakness