CAPEC-14: Client-side Injection-induced Buffer Overflow

Description

This type of attack exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in targeted client software through injection of malicious content from a custom-built hostile service. This hostile service is created to deliver the correct content to the client software. For example, if the client-side application is a browser, the service will host a webpage that the browser loads.

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 :

High

Possibility :

Medium

Type :

Detailed

Relationships with other CAPECs

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

CAPEC-13: Subverting Environment Variable Values Subverting Environment Variable Values CAPEC-100: Overflow Buffers Overflow Buffers

Prerequisites

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

The targeted client software communicates with an external server.
The targeted client software has a buffer overflow vulnerability.

Skills required

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

Low To achieve a denial of service, an attacker can simply overflow a buffer by inserting a long string into an attacker-modifiable injection vector.
High Exploiting a buffer overflow to inject malicious code into the stack of a software system or even the heap requires a more in-depth knowledge and higher skill level.

Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

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-20: Improper Input Validation

CWE-74: Improper Neutralization of Special Elements in Output Used by a Downstream Component ('Injection')

CWE-118: Incorrect Access of Indexable Resource ('Range Error')

CWE-119: Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CWE-120: Buffer Copy without Checking Size of Input ('Classic Buffer Overflow')

CWE-353: Missing Support for Integrity Check

CWE-680: Integer Overflow to Buffer Overflow

CWE-697: Incorrect Comparison

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