Weakness · High

CWE-294: Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay

What it is

A capture-replay flaw exists when the design of the product makes it possible for a malicious user to sniff network traffic and bypass authentication by replaying it to the server in question to the same effect as the original message (or with minor changes).

Likelihood of exploit: High1 exploited in the wildMITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
High
Likelihood of exploit
High
Introduced during
Architecture and Design
Exploited in the wild
1 known exploited CVE

In more detail

Capture-replay attacks are common and can be difficult to defeat without cryptography. They are a subset of network injection attacks that rely on observing previously-sent valid commands, then changing them slightly if necessary and resending the same commands to the server.

What an attacker can do

  • Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

  • Utilize some sequence or time stamping functionality along with a checksum which takes this into account in order to ensure that messages can be parsed only once.
  • Since any attacker who can listen to traffic can see sequence numbers, it is necessary to sign messages with some kind of cryptography to ensure that sequence numbers are not simply doctored along with content.

CWE-294 on MITRE's CWE site

Exploited in the wild: 1 CVE

Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-294 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.

All known exploited vulnerabilities

H2 Security

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.