CAPEC-47: Buffer Overflow via Parameter Expansion

Description
In this attack, the target software is given input that the adversary knows will be modified and expanded in size during processing. This attack relies on the target software failing to anticipate that the expanded data may exceed some internal limit, thereby creating a buffer overflow.
Extended Description

By having control of some text in the victim's domain, the attacker is able to inject a seemingly valid CSS string. It does not matter if this CSS string is preceded by other data. The CSS parser will still locate the CSS string. If the attacker is able to control two injection points, one before the cross domain data that the attacker is interested in receiving and the other one after, the attacker can use this attack to steal all of the data in between these two CSS injection points when referencing the injected CSS while performing rendering on the site that the attacker controls. When rendering, the CSS parser will detect the valid CSS string to parse and ignore the data that "does not make sense". That data will simply be rendered. That data is in fact the data that the attacker just stole cross domain. The stolen data may contain sensitive information, such CSRF protection tokens.

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.

Prerequisites

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

  • The program expands one of the parameters passed to a function with input controlled by the user, but a later function making use of the expanded parameter erroneously considers the original, not the expanded size of the parameter.
  • The expanded parameter is used in the context where buffer overflow may become possible due to the incorrect understanding of the parameter size (i.e. thinking that it is smaller than it really is).
Skills required

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

  • High Finding this particular buffer overflow may not be trivial. Also, stack and especially heap based buffer overflows require a lot of knowledge if the intended goal is arbitrary code execution. Not only that the adversary needs to write the shell code to accomplish their goals, but the adversary also needs to find a way to get the program execution to jump to the planted shell code. There also needs to be sufficient room for the payload. So not every buffer overflow will be exploitable, even by a skilled adversary.
Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

Resources required

Access to the program source or binary. If the program is only available in binary then a disassembler and other reverse engineering tools will be helpful.

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

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