CWE-565Reliance on Cookies without Validation and Integrity Checking

Description

Common consequences· 2

• Confidentiality / Integrity / Availability — Modify Application Data, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
  Attackers can easily modify cookies, within the browser or by implementing the client-side code outside of the browser. Reliance on cookies without detailed validation and integrity checking can allow attackers to bypass authentication, conduct injection attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, or otherwise modify inputs in unexpected ways.
• Access Control — Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
  It is dangerous to use cookies to set a user's privileges. The cookie can be manipulated to escalate an attacker's privileges to an administrative level.

Potential mitigations· 4

• [Architecture and Design]Avoid using cookie data for a security-related decision.
• [Implementation]Perform thorough input validation (i.e.: server side validation) on the cookie data if you're going to use it for a security related decision.
• [Architecture and Design]Add integrity checks to detect tampering.
• [Architecture and Design]Protect critical cookies from replay attacks, since cross-site scripting or other attacks may allow attackers to steal a strongly-encrypted cookie that also passes integrity checks. This mitigation applies to cookies that should only be valid during a single transaction or session. By enforcing timeouts, you may limit the scope of an attack. As part of your integrity check, use an unpredictable, server-side value that is not exposed to the client.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 3

Exploits (incoming)3

(incoming)7

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.