COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-87

Forceful Browsing

An attacker employs forceful browsing (direct URL entry) to access portions of a website that are otherwise unreachable. Usually, a front controller or similar design pattern is employed to protect access to portions of a web application. Forceful browsing enables an attacker to access information, perform privileged operations and otherwise reach sections of the web application that have been improperly protected.

Abstraction

Standard

Typical severity

High

Likelihood of attack

High

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An attacker employs forceful browsing (direct URL entry) to access portions of a website that are otherwise unreachable. Usually, a front controller or similar design pattern is employed to protect access to portions of a web application. Forceful browsing enables an attacker to access information, perform privileged operations and otherwise reach sections of the web application that have been improperly protected.

Execution flow

How does the attack proceed, step by step?

1

Explore

Spider

Using an automated tool, an attacker follows all public links on a web site. They record all the links they find.

Techniques used

  • Use a spidering tool to follow and record all links.
  • Use a proxy tool to record all links visited during a manual traversal of the web application.
2

Experiment

Attempt well-known or guessable resource locations

Using an automated tool, an attacker requests a variety of well-known URLs that correspond to administrative, debugging, or other useful internal actions. They record all the positive responses from the server.

Techniques used

  • Use a spidering tool to follow and record attempts on well-known URLs.
  • Use a proxy tool to record all links visited during a manual traversal of attempts on well-known URLs.
3

Exploit

Use unauthorized resources

By visiting the unprotected resource, the attacker makes use of unauthorized functionality.

Techniques used

  • Access unprotected functions and execute them.

View unauthorized data

The attacker discovers and views unprotected sensitive data.

Techniques used

  • Direct request of protected pages that directly access database back-ends. (e.g., list.jsp, accounts.jsp, status.jsp, etc.)

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

  • The forcibly browseable pages or accessible resources must be discoverable and improperly protected.

Skills required

  • Low: Forcibly browseable pages can be discovered by using a number of automated tools. Doing the same manually is tedious but by no means difficult.

Resources required

  • None: No specialized resources are required to execute this type of attack. A directory listing is helpful, but not a requirement.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Read Data

Affected scopes: Confidentiality

Bypass Protection Mechanism

Affected scopes: Confidentiality, Access Control, Authorization

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
Authenticate request to every resource. In addition, every page or resource must ensure that the request it is handling has been made in an authorized context.
2
Forceful browsing can also be made difficult to a large extent by not hard-coding names of application pages or resources. This way, the attacker cannot figure out, from the application alone, the resources available from the present context.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail
A bulletin board application provides an administrative interface at admin.aspx when the user logging in belongs to the administrators group. An attacker can access the admin.aspx interface by making a direct request to the page. Not having access to the interface appropriately protected allows the attacker to perform administrative functions without having to authenticate themself in that role.
CAPEC-87: Forceful Browsing — DayBreach Saldırı Sözlüğü · DayBreach