CAPEC-510

Standard 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: High Severity: Medium
SaaS User Request Forgery

Description

An adversary, through a previously installed malicious application, performs malicious actions against a third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) application (also known as a cloud based application) by leveraging the persistent and implicit trust placed on a trusted user's session. This attack is executed after a trusted user is authenticated into a cloud service, "piggy-backing" on the authenticated session, and exploiting the fact that the cloud service believes it is only interacting with the trusted user. If successful, the actions embedded in the malicious application will be processed and accepted by the targeted SaaS application and executed at the trusted user's privilege level.

Prerequisites

An adversary must be able install a purpose built malicious application onto the trusted user's system and convince the user to execute it while authenticated to the SaaS application.

Mitigations

To limit one's exposure to this type of attack, tunnel communications through a secure proxy service.

Detection of this type of attack can be done through heuristic analysis of behavioral anomalies (a la credit card fraud detection) which can be used to identify inhuman behavioral patterns. (e.g., spidering)

Skills Required

[Medium] This attack pattern often requires the technical ability to modify a malicious software package (e.g. Zeus) to spider a targeted site and a way to trick a user into a malicious software download.