Attack through Shared Data
Attack Pattern ID: 124 (Standard Attack Pattern Completeness: Stub)Typical Severity: MediumStatus: Draft
+ Description

Summary

An attacker exploits a data structure shared between multiple applications or an application pool to affect application behavior. Data may be shared between multiple applications or between multiple threads of a single application. Data sharing is usually accomplished through mutual access to a single memory location. If an attacker can manipulate this shared data (usually by co-opting one of the applications or threads) the other applications or threads using the shared data will often continue to trust the validity of the compromised shared data and use it in their calculations. This can result in invalid trust assumptions, corruption of additional data through the normal operations of the other users of the shared data, or even cause a crash or compromise of the sharing applications.

+ Attack Prerequisites

The target applications (or target application threads) must share data between themselves.

The attacker must be able to manipulate some piece of the shared data either directly or indirectly and the other users of the data must accept the changed data as valid.

+ Resources Required

The attacker must be able to change the shared data. Usually this requires that the attacker be able to compromise one of the sharing applications or threads in order to manipulated the shared data.

+ Related Weaknesses
CWE-IDWeakness NameWeakness Relationship Type
682Incorrect CalculationTargeted
+ Related Attack Patterns
NatureTypeIDNameDescriptionView(s) this relationship pertains toView\(s\)
ChildOfCategoryCategory255Data Structure Attacks 
Mechanism of Attack (primary)1000