CAPEC-109

Detailed Abstraction Level
Meta — Very abstract, high-level category
Standard — Specific enough to understand
Detailed — Tied to specific technique Draft MITRE CAPEC Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development
Incomplete — Partially defined
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CAPEC Likelihood: Low Severity: High
Object Relational Mapping Injection

Description

An attacker leverages a weakness present in the database access layer code generated with an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool or a weakness in the way that a developer used a persistence framework to inject their own SQL commands to be executed against the underlying database. The attack here is similar to plain SQL injection, except that the application does not use JDBC to directly talk to the database, but instead it uses a data access layer generated by an ORM tool or framework (e.g. Hibernate). While most of the time code generated by an ORM tool contains safe access methods that are immune to SQL injection, sometimes either due to some weakness in the generated code or due to the fact that the developer failed to use the generated access methods properly, SQL injection is still possible.

Prerequisites

An application uses data access layer generated by an ORM tool or framework

An application uses user supplied data in queries executed against the database

The separation between data plane and control plane is not ensured, through either developer error or an underlying weakness in the data access layer code generation framework

Mitigations

Remember to understand how to use the data access methods generated by the ORM tool / framework properly in a way that would leverage the built-in security mechanisms of the framework

Ensure to keep up to date with security relevant updates to the persistence framework used within your application.

Skills Required

[Medium] Knowledge of general SQL injection techniques and subtleties of the ORM framework is needed