Weakness · High
CWE-520: .NET Misconfiguration: Use of Impersonation
What it is
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.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
.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.
What an attacker can do
- Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)
How to prevent it
Operation
- Run the application with limited privilege to the underlying operating and file system.
H2 Security
Found it in your code?
We review where it appears, fix it with your team, and check it was not already used against you.
Talk to our teamT Academy
Stop writing it in the first place
Learn to build software and systems without weaknesses like this one, with practice on real hosts in your browser, every objective checked on the machine.
Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.