CWE-565: Reliance on Cookies without Validation and Integrity Checking
Description
The product relies on the existence or values of cookies when performing security-critical operations, but it does not properly ensure that the setting is valid for the associated user.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Status
- Incomplete
Common consequences
- ConfidentialityIntegrityAvailability
Modify Application Data; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
Attackers can easily modify cookies, within the browser or by implementing the client-side code outside of the browser. Reliance on cookies without detailed validation and integrity checking can allow attackers to bypass authentication, conduct injection attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, or...
- Access Control
Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
It is dangerous to use cookies to set a user's privileges. The cookie can be manipulated to escalate an attacker's privileges to an administrative level.
Potential mitigations
- Architecture and Design
Avoid using cookie data for a security-related decision.
- Implementation
Perform thorough input validation (i.e.: server side validation) on the cookie data if you're going to use it for a security related decision.
- Architecture and Design
Add integrity checks to detect tampering.
- Architecture and Design
Protect critical cookies from replay attacks, since cross-site scripting or other attacks may allow attackers to steal a strongly-encrypted cookie that also passes integrity checks. This mitigation applies to cookies that should only be valid during a single transaction or session. By enforcing timeouts, you may limit the scope of an attack. As part of your integrity check, use an unpredictable, server-side value that is not exposed to the client.