CAPEC-663: Exploitation of Transient Instruction Execution
Description
Extended Description
This attack first requires the adversary to trick the victim into installing a Trojan Horse application on their system, such as a malicious web browser plugin, which the adversary then leverages to mount the attack. The victim interacts with a web application, such as a banking website, in a normal manner and under the assumption that the connection is secure. However, the adversary can now alter and/or reroute traffic between the client application (e.g., web browser) and the coinciding endpoint, while simultaneously displaying intended transactions and data back to the user. The adversary may also be able to glean cookies, HTTP sessions, and SSL client certificates, which can be used to pivot into an authenticated intranet. Identifying AITB is often difficult because these attacks are successful even when security mechanisms such as SSL/PKI and multifactor authentication are present, since they still function as intended during the attack.
Severity :
Very High
Possibility :
Low
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 adversary needs at least user execution access to a system and a maliciously crafted program/application/process with unprivileged code to misuse transient instruction set execution of the CPU.
Skills required
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.
- High Detailed knowledge on how various CPU architectures and microcode perform transient execution for various low-level assembly language code instructions/operations.
- High Detailed knowledge on compiled binaries and operating system shared libraries of instruction sequences, and layout of application and OS/Kernel address spaces for data leakage.
Taxonomy mappings
Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.
Resources required
C2C mechanism or direct access to victim system, capable of dropping malicious program and collecting covert channel attack data.
Malicious program capable of triggering execution of transient instructions or vulnerable instruction sequences of victim program and performing a covert channel attack to gather data from victim process memory space. Ultimately, the speed with which an attacker discovers a secret is directly proportional to the computational resources of the victim machine.
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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