8. Software and Data Integrity Failures
What are Software and Data Integrity Failures?
Software and data integrity failures relate to code and infrastructure that does not protect against integrity violations. An example of this is where an application relies upon plugins, libraries, or modules from untrusted sources, repositories, and content delivery networks (CDNs). An insecure CI/CD pipeline can introduce the potential for unauthorized access, malicious code, or system compromise. Lastly, many applications now include auto-update functionality, where updates are downloaded without sufficient integrity verification and applied to the previously trusted application. Attackers could potentially upload their own updates to be distributed and run on all installations. Another example is where objects or data are encoded or serialized into a structure that an attacker can see and modify is vulnerable to insecure deserialization.
Scenario 1
Many home routers, set-top boxes, device firmware, and others do not verify updates via signed firmware. Unsigned firmware is a growing target for attackers and is expected to only get worse. This is a major concern as many times there is no mechanism to remediate other than to fix in a future version and wait for previous versions to age out.
Scenario 2
Nation-states have been known to attack update mechanisms, with a recent notable attack being the SolarWinds Orion attack. The company that develops the software had secure build and update integrity processes. Still, these were able to be subverted, and for several months, the firm distributed a highly targeted malicious update to more than 18,000 organizations, of which around 100 or so were affected. This is one of the most far-reaching and most significant breaches of this nature in history.
Scenario 3
A React application calls a set of Spring Boot microservices. Being functional programmers, they tried to ensure that their code is immutable. The solution they came up with is serializing the user state and passing it back and forth with each request. An attacker notices the "rO0" Java object signature (in base64) and uses the Java Serial Killer tool to gain remote code execution on the application server.
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