CAPEC-138: Reflection Injection

Description

An adversary supplies a value to the target application which is then used by reflection methods to identify a class, method, or field. For example, in the Java programming language the reflection libraries permit an application to inspect, load, and invoke classes and their components by name. If an adversary can control the input into these methods including the name of the class/method/field or the parameters passed to methods, they can cause the targeted application to invoke incorrect methods, read random fields, or even to load and utilize malicious classes that the adversary created. This can lead to the application revealing sensitive information, returning incorrect results, or even having the adversary take control of the targeted application.

Extended Description

Many applications allow users to send email messages by filling in fields. For example, a web site may have a link to "share this site with a friend" where the user provides the recipient's email address and the web application fills out all the other fields, such as the subject and body. In this pattern, an adversary adds header and body information to an email message by injecting additional content in an input field used to construct a header of the mail message. This attack takes advantage of the fact that RFC 822 requires that headers in a mail message be separated by a carriage return. As a result, an adversary can inject new headers or content simply by adding a delimiting carriage return and then supplying the new heading and body information. This attack will not work if the user can only supply the message body since a carriage return in the body is treated as a normal character.

Severity :

Very High

Possibility :

Type :

Standard

Relationships with other CAPECs

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

CAPEC-137: Parameter Injection Parameter Injection

Prerequisites

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

The target application must utilize reflection libraries and allow users to directly control the parameters to these methods. If the adversary can host classes where the target can invoke them, more powerful variants of this attack are possible.
The target application must accept a string as user input, fail to sanitize characters that have a special meaning in the parameter encoding, and insert the user-supplied string in an encoding which is then processed.

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: No specialized resources are required 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-470: Use of Externally-Controlled Input to Select Classes or Code ('Unsafe Reflection')

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