Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is used as a communication protocol between a client and server to invoke web services on the server. It is an XML-based protocol, and therefore suffers from many of the same shortcomings as other XML-based protocols. Adversaries can make use of these shortcomings and manipulate the content of SOAP paramters, leading to undesirable behavior on the server and allowing the adversary to carry out a number of further attacks.
Likelihood Of Attack
Medium
Typical Severity
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.
Detailed Attack Pattern - A detailed level attack pattern in CAPEC provides a low level of detail, typically leveraging a specific technique and targeting a specific technology, and expresses a complete execution flow. Detailed attack patterns are more specific than meta attack patterns and standard attack patterns and often require a specific protection mechanism to mitigate actual attacks. A detailed level attack pattern often will leverage a number of different standard level attack patterns chained together to accomplish a goal.
Detailed Attack Pattern - A detailed level attack pattern in CAPEC provides a low level of detail, typically leveraging a specific technique and targeting a specific technology, and expresses a complete execution flow. Detailed attack patterns are more specific than meta attack patterns and standard attack patterns and often require a specific protection mechanism to mitigate actual attacks. A detailed level attack pattern often will leverage a number of different standard level attack patterns chained together to accomplish a goal.
Detect Incorrect SOAP Parameter Handling: The adversary tampers with the SOAP message parameters and looks for indications that the tampering caused a change in behavior of the targeted application.
Techniques
Send more data than would seem reasonable for a field and see if the server complains.
Send nonsense data in a field that expects a certain subset, such as product names or sequence numbers, and see if the server complains.
Send XML metacharacters as data and see how the server responds.
Exploit
Find target application: The adversary needs to identify an application that uses SOAP as a communication protocol.
Techniques
Observe HTTP traffic to an application and look for SOAP headers.
Manipulate SOAP parameters: The adversary manipulates SOAP parameters in a way that causes undesirable behavior for the server. This can result in denial of service, information disclosure, arbitrary code exection, and more.
Techniques
Create a recursive XML payload that will take up all of the memory on the server when parsed, resulting in a denial of service. This is known as the billion laughs attack.
Insert XML metacharacters into data fields that could cause the server to go into an error state when parsing. This could lead to a denial of service.
Insert a large amount of data into a field that should have a character limit, causing a buffer overflow.
Prerequisites
An application uses SOAP-based web service api.
An application does not perform sufficient input validation to ensure that user-controllable data is safe for an XML parser.
The targeted server either fails to verify that data in SOAP messages conforms to the appropriate XML schema, or it fails to correctly handle the complete range of data allowed by the schema.
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
Availability
Resource Consumption
Confidentiality
Read Data
Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability
Execute Unauthorized Commands
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.
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.
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