Remediation of insecure direct object vulnerability

The exploitation of “insecure direct object vulnerability” occurs when attackers use cookies data, header values, or Wi-Fi packet captures to do tampering. “PID”, “id”, “uid” etc are common types of valuable HTTP parameters whose values can be seen in cookies. Users are the ones who generate the values by sending or receiving a request from web application servers. In the other words, hackers use what users have assigned value to as a means to do tampering. Look at the following examples of suspicious data:

1. www.xyz.com/myaccount/uid=12
2. www.xyz.com/myaccount/uid=14
3. www.xyz.com/myaccount/uid=15
4. www.xyz.com/myaccount/uid=19

Exploiting insecure direct object vulnerability can manipulate a huge amount of the data that users generate by uploading and downloading data from web app servers. Attackers can tamper with our data to break authentication.

How crucial is insecure direct object vulnerability?

Insecure direct object vulnerability is crucial enough to be placed on the top ten OWASP vulnerabilities list. The importance of the “authentication” process is what makes IDOR vulnerability even more crucial. Authentication is the process of verifying a person’s identity and granting that person access to certain requests. Black hat hackers can break authentication, and that can lead to insecure direct object reference vulnerability. Breaking the authentication lets hackers view your data without being verified.

How are IDOR Vulnerabilities exploited?

“String query = “SELECT * FROM accts WHERE account =?”;

PreparedStatement pstmt = connection.prepareStatement(query, … );

pstmt.setString(1, request.getParameter(“acct”));

ResultSet results = pstmt.executeQuery( );”

Look at the code above, before reading the rest of the article. Hackers can change the parameter that is known as “accts” in the web application and insert numerous account numbers to obtain information using the above code. The breaking process gets a lot easier if the back-end working of a Web application contains an unauthenticated medium in its SQL.

From breaking the authentication to exploiting the “IDOR” vulnerability, there is a gap between breaking authentication and exploiting “IDOR” vulnerability that can be bridged by Burp Suite Tool. When using Burp Suite Tool, hackers capture their requests at the first step of exploiting IDOR. Capturing the request contains adding a website to the scope, and spidering it to get a list of all URLs that include specific parameters. Then they check the listed parameters to see if they are suitable injection points for executing an attack. Only one suitable injection point is enough for exploiting IDOR. The only thing that hackers need to do is to forward the injection point to the repeater, and that’s it. They can start tempering by social engineering methods.

Injections with huge impacts

Vulnerabilities such as insecure direct object vulnerability occur as a result of very inconsiderable errors in back-end writing, but they can lead to huge security breaches. Exploiting the IDOR vulnerability enable hackers to use an authentication bypass mechanism that can let them take control over users’ accounts that access their personal information. Want to stops the? Talk with our security experts. This breach is known as PRIVY, or exposure of confidential information. Besides, having an authentication bypass mechanism can cause serious breaches by itself.

Exploiting IDOR vulnerability also lets hackers manipulate the records of users by changing altering their data. Exploiting IDOR can be used as a bridge to make more serious data breaches such as account takeover vulnerabilities. Account takeover vulnerability can be exploited by changing “UID” values.

Remediation of IDOR Vulnerability

IDOR Vulnerabilities can be remediated by taking four simple steps. At the first step, security researchers have to check all back end (and even front end!) codes to check if developers have displayed private object references on the web app codes. In the second step, they have to check the implementation of parameters’ validation to check if they are properly implemented. Thirdly, researchers should verify all the referenced objects. The final step is more about the regularity of the way web app developers present their services. Security researchers in SecureBug know how to check if the presentation methods are standard. For example, the token generation process should be mapped to the users only and not displayed to the public.