Privilege Defined With Unsafe Actions

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

This code intends to allow only Administrators to print debug information about a system.

public enum Roles {
  ADMIN,USER,GUEST
}

public void printDebugInfo(User requestingUser){

  if(isAuthenticated(requestingUser)){

    switch(requestingUser.role){

      case GUEST:
        System.out.println("You are not authorized to perform this command");
        break;

      default:
        System.out.println(currentDebugState());
        break;


    }

  }
  else{
    System.out.println("You must be logged in to perform this command");
  }

}

While the intention was to only allow Administrators to print the debug information, the code as written only excludes those with the role of "GUEST". Someone with the role of "ADMIN" or "USER" will be allowed access, which goes against the original intent. An attacker may be able to use this debug information to craft an attack on the system.

See Also