CWE-294

Base Abstraction Level
Pillar — Highest-level weakness category
Class — Abstract, language-independent
Base — Specific enough to detect
Variant — Tied to specific technology
Compound — Requires multiple weaknesses Incomplete MITRE CWE Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development, may change
Incomplete — Partially defined by MITRE
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CWE Exploit: High
Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay

Description

A capture-replay flaw exists when the design of the product makes it possible for a malicious user to sniff network traffic and bypass authentication by replaying it to the server in question to the same effect as the original message (or with minor changes).

Capture-replay attacks are common and can be difficult to defeat without cryptography. They are a subset of network injection attacks that rely on observing previously-sent valid commands, then changing them slightly if necessary and resending the same commands to the server.

Top Monitored CVEs

CVE-2023-23397
CRITICAL KEV
9.8 97.4%
2023-03-14
CVE-2023-30909
CRITICAL
9.8 1.1%
2023-09-14

Consequences

Access Control — Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

Messages sent with a capture-relay attack allow access to resources which are not otherwise accessible without proper authentication.

Mitigations

Phase: Architecture and Design

Utilize some sequence or time stamping functionality along with a checksum which takes this into account in order to ensure that messages can be parsed only once.

Phase: Architecture and Design

Since any attacker who can listen to traffic can see sequence numbers, it is necessary to sign messages with some kind of cryptography to ensure that sequence numbers are not simply doctored along with content.