CAPEC-87

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: High
Forceful Browsing

Description

An attacker employs forceful browsing (direct URL entry) to access portions of a website that are otherwise unreachable. Usually, a front controller or similar design pattern is employed to protect access to portions of a web application. Forceful browsing enables an attacker to access information, perform privileged operations and otherwise reach sections of the web application that have been improperly protected.

Prerequisites

The forcibly browseable pages or accessible resources must be discoverable and improperly protected.

Mitigations

Authenticate request to every resource. In addition, every page or resource must ensure that the request it is handling has been made in an authorized context.

Forceful browsing can also be made difficult to a large extent by not hard-coding names of application pages or resources. This way, the attacker cannot figure out, from the application alone, the resources available from the present context.

Skills Required

[Low] Forcibly browseable pages can be discovered by using a number of automated tools. Doing the same manually is tedious but by no means difficult.