CAPEC-8: Buffer Overflow in an API Call

Description
This attack targets libraries or shared code modules which are vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks. An adversary who has knowledge of known vulnerable libraries or shared code can easily target software that makes use of these libraries. All clients that make use of the code library thus become vulnerable by association. This has a very broad effect on security across a system, usually affecting more than one software process.
Extended Description

A URL may contain special character that need special syntax handling in order to be interpreted. Special characters are represented using a percentage character followed by two digits representing the octet code of the original character (%HEX-CODE).

For instance US-ASCII space character would be represented with %20. This is often referred as escaped ending or percent-encoding. Since the server decodes the URL from the requests, it may restrict the access to some URL paths by validating and filtering out the URL requests it received. An adversary will try to craft an URL with a sequence of special characters which once interpreted by the server will be equivalent to a forbidden URL.

It can be difficult to protect against this attack since the URL can contain other format of encoding such as UTF-8 encoding, Unicode-encoding, etc. The adversary could also subvert the meaning of the URL string request by encoding the data being sent to the server through a GET request. For instance an adversary may subvert the meaning of parameters used in a SQL request and sent through the URL string (See Example section).

Severity :

High

Possibility :

High

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 target host exposes an API to the user.
  • One or more API functions exposed by the target host has a buffer overflow vulnerability.
Skills required

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

  • Low An adversary can simply overflow a buffer by inserting a long string into an adversary-modifiable injection vector. The result can be a DoS.
  • High Exploiting a buffer overflow to inject malicious code into the stack of a software system or even the heap can require a higher skill level.
Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

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

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Latest DB Update: Dec. 14, 2024 3:13