Vulnerabilities > CVE-2016-8763 - Improper Control of a Resource Through its Lifetime vulnerability in Huawei P8 Lite Firmware, P9 Firmware and P9 Lite Firmware

An attacker creates a false but functional session credential in order to gain or usurp access to a service. Session credentials allow users to identify themselves to a service after an initial authentication without needing to resend the authentication information (usually a username and password) with every message. If an attacker is able to forge valid session credentials they may be able to bypass authentication or piggy-back off some other authenticated user's session. This attack differs from Reuse of Session IDs and Session Sidejacking attacks in that in the latter attacks an attacker uses a previous or existing credential without modification while, in a forging attack, the attacker must create their own credential, although it may be based on previously observed credentials.

Attacks on session IDs and resource IDs take advantage of the fact that some software accepts user input without verifying its authenticity. For example, a message queuing system that allows service requesters to post messages to its queue through an open channel (such as anonymous FTP), authorization is done through checking group or role membership contained in the posted message. However, there is no proof that the message itself, the information in the message (such group or role membership), or indeed the process that wrote the message to the queue are authentic and authorized to do so. Many server side processes are vulnerable to these attacks because the server to server communications have not been analyzed from a security perspective or the processes "trust" other systems because they are behind a firewall. In a similar way servers that use easy to guess or spoofable schemes for representing digital identity can also be vulnerable. Such systems frequently use schemes without cryptography and digital signatures (or with broken cryptography). Session IDs may be guessed due to insufficient randomness, poor protection (passed in the clear), lack of integrity (unsigned), or improperly correlation with access control policy enforcement points. Exposed configuration and properties files that contain system passwords, database connection strings, and such may also give an attacker an edge to identify these identifiers. The net result is that spoofing and impersonation is possible leading to an attacker's ability to break authentication, authorization, and audit controls on the system.

This attack targets the reuse of valid session ID to spoof the target system in order to gain privileges. The attacker tries to reuse a stolen session ID used previously during a transaction to perform spoofing and session hijacking. Another name for this type of attack is Session Replay.

The attacker induces a client to establish a session with the target software using a session identifier provided by the attacker. Once the user successfully authenticates to the target software, the attacker uses the (now privileged) session identifier in their own transactions. This attack leverages the fact that the target software either relies on client-generated session identifiers or maintains the same session identifiers after privilege elevation.

An attacker crafts malicious web links and distributes them (via web pages, email, etc.), typically in a targeted manner, hoping to induce users to click on the link and execute the malicious action against some third-party application. If successful, the action embedded in the malicious link will be processed and accepted by the targeted application with the users' privilege level. This type of attack leverages the persistence and implicit trust placed in user session cookies by many web applications today. In such an architecture, once the user authenticates to an application and a session cookie is created on the user's system, all following transactions for that session are authenticated using that cookie including potential actions initiated by an attacker and simply "riding" the existing session cookie.