CAPEC-60

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: High Severity: High
Reusing Session IDs (aka Session Replay)

Description

This attack targets the reuse of valid session ID to spoof the target system in order to gain privileges. The attacker tries to reuse a stolen session ID used previously during a transaction to perform spoofing and session hijacking. Another name for this type of attack is Session Replay.

Prerequisites

The target host uses session IDs to keep track of the users.

Session IDs are used to control access to resources.

The session IDs used by the target host are not well protected from session theft.

Mitigations

Always invalidate a session ID after the user logout.

Setup a session time out for the session IDs.

Protect the communication between the client and server. For instance it is best practice to use SSL to mitigate adversary in the middle attacks (CAPEC-94).

Do not code send session ID with GET method, otherwise the session ID will be copied to the URL. In general avoid writing session IDs in the URLs. URLs can get logged in log files, which are vulnerable to an attacker.

Encrypt the session data associated with the session ID.

Use multifactor authentication.

Skills Required

[Low] If an attacker can steal a valid session ID, they can then try to be authenticated with that stolen session ID.

[Medium] More sophisticated attack can be used to hijack a valid session from a user and spoof a legitimate user by reusing their valid session ID.