CAPEC-234: Hijacking a privileged process

Description
An adversary gains control of a process that is assigned elevated privileges in order to execute arbitrary code with those privileges. Some processes are assigned elevated privileges on an operating system, usually through association with a particular user, group, or role. If an attacker can hijack this process, they will be able to assume its level of privilege in order to execute their own code.
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.

Severity :

Medium

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.

Prerequisites

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

  • The targeted process or operating system must contain a bug that allows attackers to hijack the targeted process.
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.

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