CAPEC-586

Meta 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: Medium Severity: High
Object Injection

Description

An adversary attempts to exploit an application by injecting additional, malicious content during its processing of serialized objects. Developers leverage serialization in order to convert data or state into a static, binary format for saving to disk or transferring over a network. These objects are then deserialized when needed to recover the data/state. By injecting a malformed object into a vulnerable application, an adversary can potentially compromise the application by manipulating the deserialization process. This can result in a number of unwanted outcomes, including remote code execution.

Prerequisites

The target application must unserialize data before validation.

Mitigations

Implementation: Validate object before deserialization process

Design: Limit which types can be deserialized.

Implementation: Avoid having unnecessary types or gadgets available that can be leveraged for malicious ends. Use an allowlist of acceptable classes.

Implementation: Keep session state on the server, when possible.