CAPEC-248: Command Injection

Description
An adversary looking to execute a command of their choosing, injects new items into an existing command thus modifying interpretation away from what was intended. Commands in this context are often standalone strings that are interpreted by a downstream component and cause specific responses. This type of attack is possible when untrusted values are used to build these command strings. Weaknesses in input validation or command construction can enable the attack and lead to successful exploitation.
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 :

High

Possibility :

Medium

Type :

Meta
Prerequisites

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

  • The target application must accept input from the user and then use this input in the construction of commands to be executed. In virtually all cases, this is some form of string input that is concatenated to a constant string defined by the application to form the full command to be executed.
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.

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.

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