CAPEC-279: SOAP Manipulation
Description
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is used as a communication protocol between a client and server to invoke web services on the server. It is an XML-based protocol, and therefore suffers from many of the same shortcomings as other XML-based protocols. Adversaries can make use of these shortcomings and manipulate the content of SOAP paramters, leading to undesirable behavior on the server and allowing the adversary to carry out a number of further attacks.
- Likelihood of attack
- Medium
- Typical severity
- High
- Abstraction
- DetailedA low-level, detailed pattern, often for a particular technology.
Mechanism of attack: Abuse Existing Functionality
Prerequisites
- An application uses SOAP-based web service api.
- An application does not perform sufficient input validation to ensure that user-controllable data is safe for an XML parser.
- The targeted server either fails to verify that data in SOAP messages conforms to the appropriate XML schema, or it fails to correctly handle the complete range of data allowed by the schema.
Consequences
- Availability
Resource Consumption
- Confidentiality
Read Data
- ConfidentialityIntegrityAvailability
Execute Unauthorized Commands
Mitigations
CAPEC 3.9 lists no mitigation for this pattern; see its child patterns or related weaknesses.