Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Broker injection

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Broker injection attack is a type of vulnerability that exploits misconfigured brokers, potentially allowing an attacker to read, write and inject information from/into their flow.

Contents

Description

There are lots of scenarios in which a broker is used to transport the information between task.

One of the most typical use cases is send e-mails in background. In this scenario we'll have two actors:

  • An information producer (a website, for example).
  • A worker or background process who actually sends the e-mail.

    • The producer needs an asynchronous and non-blocking way to send the email information to the worker.

    This system is usually a broker. It takes the information from the web front-end and passes it to the worker, generating a new task in the worker. So, the worker has all the information to send the e-mail.

    Taking the above scenario as an example, if we could access the broker, we would be able to make the worker generate new tasks with arbitrary data, unleashing a broker injection.

    Attacks

    With this in mind, we could make the following attacks:

  • Listing remote tasks.
  • Reading a remote task's contents.
  • Injection of tasks into remote processes.
  • Removing remote outstanting tasks.

    • Origin

    The broker injection attack is not new, but it didn't has name. This name was coined by Daniel García at the RootedCON 2016 conference in Spain.

    References

    Broker injection Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA