COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-520

.NET Misconfiguration: Use of Impersonation

Allowing a .NET application to run at potentially escalated levels of access to the underlying operating and file systems can be dangerous and result in various forms of attacks.

Abstraction

Variant

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

Allowing a .NET application to run at potentially escalated levels of access to the underlying operating and file systems can be dangerous and result in various forms of attacks.

Extended description

.NET server applications can optionally execute using the identity of the user authenticated to the client. The intention of this functionality is to bypass authentication and access control checks within the .NET application code. Authentication is done by the underlying web server (Microsoft Internet Information Service IIS), which passes the authenticated token, or unauthenticated anonymous token, to the .NET application. Using the token to impersonate the client, the application then relies on the settings within the NTFS directories and files to control access. Impersonation enables the application, on the server running the .NET application, to both execute code and access resources in the context of the authenticated and authorized user.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Lifecycle phase

Operation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

Affected security scopes: Access Control

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Operation

Operational defence

Detail
Run the application with limited privilege to the underlying operating and file system.
CWE-520: Common Weakness Enumeration Entry CWE-520 · DayBreach Sözlük · DayBreach