CAPEC-231 Metadata
Likelihood of Attack
Medium
Typical Severity
High
Overview
Summary
An adversary injects oversized serialized data payloads into a parser during data processing to produce adverse effects upon the parser such as exhausting system resources and arbitrary code execution.
Prerequisites
An application uses an parser for serialized data to perform transformation on user-controllable data. An application does not perform sufficient validation to ensure that user-controllable data is safe for a data parser.
Execution Flow
| Step | Phase | Description | Techniques |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Explore | An adversary determines the input data stream that is being processed by an serialized data parser on the victim's side. |
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| 2 | Experiment | An adversary crafts input data that may have an adverse effect on the operation of the data parser when the data is parsed on the victim's system. |
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Potential Solutions / Mitigations
Carefully validate and sanitize all user-controllable serialized data prior to passing it to the parser routine. Ensure that the resultant data is safe to pass to the parser. Perform validation on canonical data. Pick a robust implementation of the serialized data parser. Validate data against a valid schema or DTD prior to parsing.
Related Weaknesses (CWE)
Related CAPECs
| CAPEC ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CAPEC-130 | An adversary causes the target to allocate excessive resources to servicing the attackers' request, thereby reducing the resources available for legitimate services and degrading or denying services. Usually, this attack focuses on memory allocation, but any finite resource on the target could be the attacked, including bandwidth, processing cycles, or other resources. This attack does not attempt to force this allocation through a large number of requests (that would be Resource Depletion through Flooding) but instead uses one or a small number of requests that are carefully formatted to force the target to allocate excessive resources to service this request(s). Often this attack takes advantage of a bug in the target to cause the target to allocate resources vastly beyond what would be needed for a normal request. |
Stay Ahead of Attack Patterns
Understanding CAPEC patterns helps security professionals anticipate and thwart potential attacks. Leverage these insights to enhance threat modeling, strengthen your software development lifecycle, and train your security teams effectively.