Malicious Logic Inserted Into Product by Authorized Developer

An adversary uses their privileged position within an authorized development organization to inject malicious logic into a codebase or product.

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

High

Likelihood of attack

Medium

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An adversary uses their privileged position within an authorized development organization to inject malicious logic into a codebase or product.

Extended description

Supply chain attacks from approved or trusted developers are extremely difficult to detect as it is generally assumed the quality control and internal security measures of these organizations conform to best practices. In some cases the malicious logic is intentional, embedded by a disgruntled employee, programmer, or individual with an otherwise hidden agenda. In other cases, the integrity of the product is compromised by accident (e.g. by lapse in the internal security of the organization that results in a product becoming contaminated). In further cases, the developer embeds a backdoor into a product to serve some purpose, such as product support, but discovery of the backdoor results in its malicious use by adversaries. It is also worth noting that this attack can occur during initial product development or throughout a product's sustainment.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

Access to the product during the initial or continuous development.

Skills required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Resources required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Execute Unauthorized Commands

Affected scopes: Authorization

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

Assess software and hardware during development and prior to deployment to ensure that it functions as intended and without any malicious functionality. This includes both initial development, as well as updates propagated to the product after deployment.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail

In January 2022 the author of popular JavaScript packages "Faker" and "colors", used for generating mock data and including colored text within NodeJS consoles respectively, introduced malicious code that resulted in a Denial of Service (DoS) via an infinite loop. When applications that leveraged these packages updated to the malicious version, their applications executed the infinite loop and output gibberish ASCI characters endlessly. This resulted in the application being unusable until a stable version of the package was obtained. [ REF-705 ]

Example instance 2Detail

During initial development, an authorized hardware developer implants a malicious microcontroller within an Internet of Things (IOT) device and programs the microcontroller to communicate with the vulnerable device. Each time the device initializes, the malicious microcontroller's code is executed, which ultimately provides the adversary with backdoor access to the vulnerable device. This can further allow the adversary to sniff network traffic, exfiltrate date, execute unauthorized commands, and/or pivot to other vulnerable devices.