CAPEC-108: Command Line Execution through SQL Injection

Description
An attacker uses standard SQL injection methods to inject data into the command line for execution. This could be done directly through misuse of directives such as MSSQL_xp_cmdshell or indirectly through injection of data into the database that would be interpreted as shell commands. Sometime later, an unscrupulous backend application (or could be part of the functionality of the same application) fetches the injected data stored in the database and uses this data as command line arguments without performing proper validation. The malicious data escapes that data plane by spawning new commands to be executed on the host.
Extended Description

The adversary uses an XSS attack to have victim's browser sent an HTTP TRACE request to a destination web server, which will proceed to return a response to the victim's web browser that contains the original HTTP request in its body. Since the HTTP header of the original HTTP TRACE request had the victim's session cookie in it, that session cookie can now be picked off the HTTP TRACE response and sent to the adversary's malicious site. XST becomes relevant when direct access to the session cookie via the "document.cookie" object is disabled with the use of httpOnly attribute which ensures that the cookie can be transmitted in HTTP requests but cannot be accessed in other ways. Using SSL does not protect against XST. If the system with which the victim is interacting is susceptible to XSS, an adversary can exploit that weakness directly to get their malicious script to issue an HTTP TRACE request to the destination system's web server.

Severity :

Very High

Possibility :

Low

Type :

Detailed
Relationships with other CAPECs

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

Prerequisites

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • The application does not properly validate data before storing in the database
  • Backend application implicitly trusts the data stored in the database
  • Malicious data is used on the backend as a command line argument
Skills required

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • High The attacker most likely has to be familiar with the internal functionality of the system to launch this attack. Without that knowledge, there are not many feedback mechanisms to give an attacker the indication of how to perform command injection or whether the attack is succeeding.
Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

Resources required

None: No specialized resources are required to execute this type of attack.

Visit http://capec.mitre.org/ for more details.