CAPEC-586: Object Injection

MITRE CAPEC attack pattern

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.

Where this sits in the chain

A finding maps to a weakness (CWE), a weakness is exploited by an attack pattern (CAPEC), and an attack pattern shows up in ATT&CK as observed adversary behaviour. This page is the middle hop.

Weaknesses exploited: CWE-502

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.

Source

• MITRE CAPEC CAPEC-586