Block Access to Libraries |
Attack Pattern ID: 96 (Standard Attack Pattern Completeness: Complete) | Typical Severity: Medium | Status: Draft |
Summary
An application typically makes calls to functions that are a part of libraries external to the application. These libraries may be part of the operating system or they may be third party libraries. It is possible that the application does not handle situations properly where access to these libraries has been blocked. Depending on the error handling within the application, blocked access to libraries may leave the system in an insecure state that could be leveraged by an attacker.
Attack Execution Flow
Determine what external libraries the application accesses.
Block access to the external libraries accessed by the application.
Monitor the behavior of the system to see if it goes into an insecure/inconsistent state.
If the system does go into an insecure/inconsistent state, leverage that to obtain information about the system functionality or data, elevate access control, etc. The rest of this attack will depend on the context and the desired goal.
An application requires access to external libraries.
An attacker has the priviliges to block application access to external libraries.
Description
A web-based system uses a third party cryptographic random number generation library that derives entropy from machine's hardware. This library is used in generation of user session ids used by the applicatoin. If the library is inaccessible, the application instead uses a software based weak pseudo random number generation library. An attacker of the system blocks access of the application to the third party cryptographic random number generation library (by renaming it). The application in turn uses the weak pseudo random number generation library to generate session ids that are predictable. An attacker then leverages this weakness to guess a session id of another user to perform a horizontal elevation of privilege escalation and gain access to another user's account.
Ensure that application handles situations where access to APIs in external libraries is not available securely. If the application cannot continue its execution safely it should fail in a consistent and secure fashion.
Nature | Type | ID | Name | Description | View(s) this relationship pertains to![]() |
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ChildOf | ![]() | 176 | Configuration/Environment manipulation | Mechanism of Attack (primary)1000 |