| Name |
Query System for Information |
|
| Likelyhood of attack |
Typical severity |
| High |
Low |
|
| Summary |
An adversary, aware of an application's location (and possibly authorized to use the application), probes an application's structure and evaluates its robustness by submitting requests and examining responses. Often, this is accomplished by sending variants of expected queries in the hope that these modified queries might return information beyond what the expected set of queries would provide. |
| Prerequisites |
This class of attacks does not strictly require authorized access to the application. As Attackers use this attack process to classify, map, and identify vulnerable aspects of an application, it simply requires hypotheses to be verified, interaction with the application, and time to conduct trial-and-error activities. |
| Execution Flow |
| Step |
Phase |
Description |
Techniques |
| 1 |
Explore |
Determine user-controllable parameters of the application |
|
| 2 |
Exploit |
Inject each parameter with content that causes an error condition to manifest |
|
| 3 |
Exploit |
Modify the content of each parameter according to observed error conditions |
|
| 4 |
Exploit |
Repeat above steps with enough parameters until the application has been sufficiently mapped out to launch desired attack (for example, Blind SQL Injection) |
|
|
| Solutions | Application designers can construct a 'code book' for error messages. When using a code book, application error messages aren't generated in string or stack trace form, but are cataloged and replaced with a unique (often integer-based) value 'coding' for the error. Such a technique will require helpdesk and hosting personnel to use a 'code book' or similar mapping to decode application errors/logs in order to respond to them normally. Application designers can wrap application functionality (preferably through the underlying framework) in an output encoding scheme that obscures or cleanses error messages to prevent such attacks. Such a technique is often used in conjunction with the above 'code book' suggestion. |
| Related Weaknesses |
|
CWE ID
|
Description
|
| CWE-209 |
Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information |
|
| Related CAPECS |
|
CAPEC ID
|
Description
|
| CAPEC-116 |
An adversary actively probes the target in a manner that is designed to solicit information that could be leveraged for malicious purposes. This is achieved by exploring the target via ordinary interactions for the purpose of gathering intelligence about the target, or by sending data that is syntactically invalid or non-standard in an attempt to produce a response that contains the desired data. As a result of these interactions, the adversary is able to obtain information from the target that aids the attacker in making inferences about its security, configuration, or potential vulnerabilities. Examplar exchanges with the target may trigger unhandled exceptions or verbose error messages that reveal information like stack traces, configuration information, path information, or database design. This type of attack also includes the manipulation of query strings in a URI to produce invalid SQL queries, or by trying alternative path values in the hope that the server will return useful information. |
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