| Name | Session Credential Falsification through Forging | ||||||||
| Summary | An attacker creates a false but functional session credential in order to gain or usurp access to a service. Session credentials allow users to identify themselves to a service after an initial authentication without needing to resend the authentication information (usually a username and password) with every message. If an attacker is able to forge valid session credentials they may be able to bypass authentication or piggy-back off some other authenticated user's session. This attack differs from Reuse of Session IDs and Session Sidejacking attacks in that in the latter attacks an attacker uses a previous or existing credential without modification while, in a forging attack, the attacker must create their own credential, although it may be based on previously observed credentials. | ||||||||
| Prerequisites | The targeted application must use session credentials to identify legitimate users. Session identifiers that remains unchanged when the privilege levels change. Predictable session identifiers. | ||||||||
| Solutions | Implementation: Use session IDs that are difficult to guess or brute-force: One way for the attackers to obtain valid session IDs is by brute-forcing or guessing them. By choosing session identifiers that are sufficiently random, brute-forcing or guessing becomes very difficult. Implementation: Regenerate and destroy session identifiers when there is a change in the level of privilege: This ensures that even though a potential victim may have followed a link with a fixated identifier, a new one is issued when the level of privilege changes. | ||||||||
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