50 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
50 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
=== What is the potential impact?
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In the context of a web application performing unsafe deserialization: +
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After detecting the injection vector, attackers inject a carefully-crafted
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payload into the application.
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Below are some real-world scenarios that illustrate some impacts of an attacker
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exploiting the vulnerability.
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==== Application-specific attacks
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In this scenario, the attackers succeed in injecting an object of the expected
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class, but with malicious properties that affect the object's behavior.
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If the application relies on the properties of the deserialized object,
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attackers can modify the data structure or content to escalate privileges or
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perform unwanted actions. +
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In the context of an e-commerce application, this could be changing the number
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of products or prices.
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==== Full application compromise
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In the worst-case scenario, the attackers succeed in injecting an object of a
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completely different class than expected, triggering code execution.
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Depending on the attacker, code execution can be used with different
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intentions:
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* Download the internal server's data, most likely to sell it.
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* Modify data, install malware, for instance, malware that mines cryptocurrencies.
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* Stop services or exhaust resources, for instance, with fork bombs.
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This threat is particularly insidious if the attacked organization does not
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maintain a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP).
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==== Root privilege escalation and pivot
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In this scenario, the attacker can do everything described in the previous
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section. The difference is that the attacker additionally manages to elevate
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his privileges as an administrator and attack other servers.
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Here, the impact depends on how much the target company focuses on its Defense
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In Depth. For example, the entire infrastructure can be compromised through a
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combination of unsafe deserialization and misconfiguration:
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* Docker or Kubernetes clusters
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* cloud services
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* network firewalls and routing
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* OS access control
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