CAPEC-138 Metadata
Likelihood of Attack
Medium
Typical Severity
Very High
Overview
Summary
An adversary supplies a value to the target application which is then used by reflection methods to identify a class, method, or field. For example, in the Java programming language the reflection libraries permit an application to inspect, load, and invoke classes and their components by name. If an adversary can control the input into these methods including the name of the class/method/field or the parameters passed to methods, they can cause the targeted application to invoke incorrect methods, read random fields, or even to load and utilize malicious classes that the adversary created. This can lead to the application revealing sensitive information, returning incorrect results, or even having the adversary take control of the targeted application.
Prerequisites
The target application must utilize reflection libraries and allow users to directly control the parameters to these methods. If the adversary can host classes where the target can invoke them, more powerful variants of this attack are possible. The target application must accept a string as user input, fail to sanitize characters that have a special meaning in the parameter encoding, and insert the user-supplied string in an encoding which is then processed.
Potential Solutions / Mitigations
No specific solutions listed.
Related Weaknesses (CWE)
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-470 | Use of Externally-Controlled Input to Select Classes or Code ('Unsafe Reflection') |
Related CAPECs
| CAPEC ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CAPEC-137 | An adversary manipulates the content of request parameters for the purpose of undermining the security of the target. Some parameter encodings use text characters as separators. For example, parameters in a HTTP GET message are encoded as name-value pairs separated by an ampersand (&). If an attacker can supply text strings that are used to fill in these parameters, then they can inject special characters used in the encoding scheme to add or modify parameters. For example, if user input is fed directly into an HTTP GET request and the user provides the value "myInput&new_param=myValue", then the input parameter is set to myInput, but a new parameter (new_param) is also added with a value of myValue. This can significantly change the meaning of the query that is processed by the server. Any encoding scheme where parameters are identified and separated by text characters is potentially vulnerable to this attack - the HTTP GET encoding used above is just one example. |
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