CAPEC-124: Shared Resource Manipulation

Description

An adversary exploits a resource shared between multiple applications, an application pool or hardware pin multiplexing to affect behavior. Resources may be shared between multiple applications or between multiple threads of a single application. Resource sharing is usually accomplished through mutual access to a single memory location or multiplexed hardware pins. If an adversary can manipulate this shared resource (usually by co-opting one of the applications or threads) the other applications or threads using the shared resource will often continue to trust the validity of the compromised shared resource and use it in their calculations. This can result in invalid trust assumptions, corruption of additional data through the normal operations of the other users of the shared resource, or even cause a crash or compromise of the sharing applications.

Extended Description

If access control mechanisms are absent or misconfigured, a user may be able to access resources that are intended only for higher level users. An adversary may be able to exploit this to utilize a less trusted account to gain information and perform activities reserved for more trusted accounts.

This attack differs from privilege escalation and other privilege stealing attacks in that the adversary never actually escalates their privileges but instead is able to use a lesser degree of privilege to access resources that should be (but are not) reserved for higher privilege accounts. Likewise, the adversary does not exploit trust or subvert systems - all control functionality is working as configured but the configuration does not adequately protect sensitive resources at an appropriate level.

Severity :

Medium

Possibility :

Type :

Relationships with other CAPECs

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

CAPEC-663: Exploitation of Transient Instruction Execution Exploitation of Transient Instruction Execution

Prerequisites

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

The target applications, threads or functions must share resources between themselves.
The adversary must be able to manipulate some piece of the shared resource either directly or indirectly and the other users of the data must accept the changed data as valid. Usually this requires that the adversary be able to compromise one of the sharing applications or threads in order to manipulate the shared data.

Skills required

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

Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

Resources required

None: The attacker does not need any specialized resources to execute this type of attack.

Related CWE

A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful.

CWE-1189: Improper Isolation of Shared Resources on System-on-a-Chip (SoC)

CWE-1331: Improper Isolation of Shared Resources in Network On Chip (NoC)

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