SOA and Web Services often use a registry to perform look up, get schema information, and metadata about services. A poisoned registry can redirect (think phishing for servers) the service requester to a malicious service provider, provide incorrect information in schema or metadata, and delete information about service provider interfaces.
Extended Description
WS-Addressing is used to virtualize services, provide return addresses and other routing information, however, unless the WS-Addressing headers are protected they are vulnerable to rewriting. Content in a registry is deployed by the service provider. The registry in an SOA or Web Services system can be accessed by the service requester via UDDI or other protocol.
Likelihood Of Attack
High
Typical Severity
Very High
Relationships
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern. These relationships are defined as ChildOf and ParentOf, and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as CanFollow, PeerOf, and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar attack patterns that the user may want to explore.
Nature
Type
ID
Name
ChildOf
Standard Attack Pattern - A standard level attack pattern in CAPEC is focused on a specific methodology or technique used in an attack. It is often seen as a singular piece of a fully executed attack. A standard attack pattern is meant to provide sufficient details to understand the specific technique and how it attempts to accomplish a desired goal. A standard level attack pattern is a specific type of a more abstract meta level attack pattern.
Find a target SOA or Web Service: The adversary must first indentify a target SOA or Web Service.
Experiment
Determine desired outcome: Because poisoning a web service registry can have different outcomes, the adversary must decide how they wish to effect the webservice.
Techniques
An adversary can perform a denial of service attack on a web service.
An adversary can redirect requests or responses to a malicious service.
Determine if a malicious service needs to be created: If the adversary wishes to redirect requests or responses, they will need to create a malicious service to redirect to.
Techniques
Create a service to that requests are sent to in addition to the legitimate service and simply record the requests.
Create a service that will give malicious responses to a service provider.
Act as a malicious service provider and respond to requests in an arbitrary way.
Exploit
Poison Web Service Registry: Based on the desired outcome, poison the web service registry. This is done by altering the data at rest in the registry or uploading malicious content by spoofing a service provider.
Techniques
Intercept and change WS-Adressing headers to route to a malicious service or service provider.
Provide incorrect information in schema or metadata to cause a denial of service.
Delete information about service procider interfaces to cause a denial of service.
Prerequisites
The attacker must be able to write to resources or redirect access to the service registry.
Skills Required
[Level: Low]
To identify and execute against an over-privileged system interface
Resources Required
Capability to directly or indirectly modify registry resources
Consequences
This table specifies different individual consequences associated with the attack pattern. The Scope identifies the security property that is violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an adversary succeeds in their attack. The Likelihood provides information about how likely the specific consequence is expected to be seen relative to the other consequences in the list. For example, there may be high likelihood that a pattern will be used to achieve a certain impact, but a low likelihood that it will be exploited to achieve a different impact.
Scope
Impact
Likelihood
Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability
Execute Unauthorized Commands
Confidentiality
Read Data
Integrity
Modify Data
Mitigations
Design: Enforce principle of least privilege
Design: Harden registry server and file access permissions
Implementation: Implement communications to and from the registry using secure protocols
Example Instances
WS-Addressing provides location and metadata about the service endpoints. An extremely hard to detect attack is an attacker who updates the WS-Addressing header, leaves the standard service request and service provider addressing and header information intact, but adds an additional WS-Addressing Replyto header. In this case the attacker is able to send a copy (like a cc in mail) of every result the service provider generates. So every query to the bank account service, would generate a reply message of the transaction status to both the authorized service requester and an attacker service. This would be extremely hard to detect at runtime.
In this example "evilsite" is an additional reply to address with full access to all the messages that the authorized (validClient) has access to. Since this is registered with ReplyTo header it will not generate a Soap fault.
Related Weaknesses
A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful. If multiple weaknesses are associated with the attack pattern, then any of the weaknesses (but not necessarily all) may be present for the attack to be successful. Each related weakness is identified by a CWE identifier.
CAPEC mappings to ATT&CK techniques leverage an inheritance model to streamline and minimize direct CAPEC/ATT&CK mappings. Inheritance of a mapping is indicated by text stating that the parent CAPEC has relevant ATT&CK mappings. Note that the ATT&CK Enterprise Framework does not use an inheritance model as part of the mapping to CAPEC.
Relevant to the ATT&CK taxonomy mapping (see
parent
)
Content History
Submissions
Submission Date
Submitter
Organization
2014-06-23
(Version 2.6)
CAPEC Content Team
The MITRE Corporation
Modifications
Modification Date
Modifier
Organization
2021-10-21
(Version 3.6)
CAPEC Content Team
The MITRE Corporation
Updated Description, Execution_Flow
2022-02-22
(Version 3.7)
CAPEC Content Team
The MITRE Corporation
Updated Description, Extended_Description
2022-09-29
(Version 3.8)
CAPEC Content Team
The MITRE Corporation
Updated Example_Instances
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Description
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern. These relationships are defined as ChildOf and ParentOf, and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as CanFollow, PeerOf, and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar attack patterns that the user may want to explore.
Content History
