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Capec-231 Detail

Oversized Serialized Data Payloads

Standard Software Likelihood: Medium Typical Severity: High

Parents: 130

Children: 221 229

Threats: T61 T64 T74 T77 T264 T265 T269 T282 T289 T308 T309 T374 T401

Description

An adversary injects oversized serialized data payloads into a parser during data processing to produce adverse effects upon the parser such as exhausting system resources and arbitrary code execution.

Extended Description

Applications often need to transform data in and out of serialized data formats, such as XML and YAML, by using a data parser. It may be possible for an adversary to inject data that may have an adverse effect on the parser when it is being processed. By supplying oversized payloads in input vectors that will be processed by the parser, an adversary can cause the parser to consume more resources while processing, causing excessive memory consumption and CPU utilization, and potentially cause execution of arbitrary code. An adversary's goal is to leverage parser failure to their advantage. DoS is most closely associated with web services, SOAP, and Rest, because remote service requesters can post malicious data payloads to the service provider designed to exhaust the service provider's memory, CPU, and/or disk space. This attack exploits the loosely coupled nature of web services, where the service provider has little to no control over the service requester and any messages the service requester sends.
External ID Source Link Description
CAPEC-231 capec https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/231.html
CWE-112 cwe http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/112.html
CWE-20 cwe http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/20.html
CWE-674 cwe http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/674.html
CWE-770 cwe http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/770.html
REF-89 reference_from_CAPEC http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/talks/xml_parser_attacks/slides/slide2.html Shlomo, Yona, XML Parser Attacks: A summary of ways to attack an XML Parser, 2007
Explore
  1. An adversary determines the input data stream that is being processed by an serialized data parser on the victim's side.

Experiment
  1. An adversary crafts input data that may have an adverse effect on the operation of the data parser when the data is parsed on the victim's system.

  1. An application uses an parser for serialized data to perform transformation on user-controllable data.
  2. An application does not perform sufficient validation to ensure that user-controllable data is safe for a data parser.

Not present

Low High
Denial of service
Arbitrary code execution
Integrity Availability Authorization Access Control Confidentiality
Execute Unauthorized Commands Resource Consumption Gain Privileges Gain Privileges Read Data
Execute Unauthorized Commands Execute Unauthorized Commands
Gain Privileges

Not present