CAPEC-492: Regular Expression Exponential Blowup

Description
An adversary may execute an attack on a program that uses a poor Regular Expression(Regex) implementation by choosing input that results in an extreme situation for the Regex. A typical extreme situation operates at exponential time compared to the input size. This is due to most implementations using a Nondeterministic Finite Automaton(NFA) state machine to be built by the Regex algorithm since NFA allows backtracking and thus more complex regular expressions.
Extended Description

The algorithm builds a finite state machine and based on the input transitions through all the states until the end of the input is reached. NFA engines may evaluate each character in the input string multiple times during the backtracking. The algorithm tries each path through the NFA one by one until a match is found; the malicious input is crafted so every path is tried which results in a failure. Exploitation of the Regex results in programs hanging or taking a very long time to complete. These attacks may target various layers of the Internet due to regular expressions being used in validation.

Severity :

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.

  • This type of an attack requires the ability to identify hosts running a poorly implemented Regex, and the ability to send crafted input to exploit the regular expression.
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.

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Latest DB Update: Dec. 14, 2024 4:48