CAPEC-586: Object Injection
Description
An adversary attempts to exploit an application by injecting additional, malicious content during its processing of serialized objects. Developers leverage serialization in order to convert data or state into a static, binary format for saving to disk or transferring over a network. These objects are then deserialized when needed to recover the data/state. By injecting a malformed object into a vulnerable application, an adversary can potentially compromise the application by manipulating the deserialization process. This can result in a number of unwanted outcomes, including remote code execution.
- Likelihood of attack
- Medium
- Typical severity
- High
- Abstraction
- MetaA decidedly abstract characterisation of a methodology or technique.
Mechanism of attack: Inject Unexpected Items
Prerequisites
- The target application must unserialize data before validation.
Consequences
- Availability
Resource Consumption
If a function is making an assumption on when to terminate, based on a sentry in a string, it could easily never terminate and exhaust available resources.
- Integrity
Modify Data
Attackers can modify objects or data that was assumed to be safe from modification.
- Authorization
Execute Unauthorized Commands
Functions that assume information in the deserialized object is valid could be exploited.
Mitigations
- Implementation: Validate object before deserialization process
- Design: Limit which types can be deserialized.
- Implementation: Avoid having unnecessary types or gadgets available that can be leveraged for malicious ends. Use an allowlist of acceptable classes.
- Implementation: Keep session state on the server, when possible.