CWE-523
Unprotected Transport of Credentials
Login pages do not use adequate measures to protect the user name and password while they are in transit from the client to the server.
Mitigation
Phases: Operation, System Configuration
Description:
- Enforce SSL use for the login page or any page used to transmit user credentials or other sensitive information. Even if the entire site does not use SSL, it MUST use SSL for login. Additionally, to help prevent phishing attacks, make sure that SSL serves the login page. SSL allows the user to verify the identity of the server to which they are connecting. If the SSL serves login page, the user can be certain they are talking to the proper end system. A phishing attack would typically redirect a user to a site that does not have a valid trusted server certificate issued from an authorized supplier.
CAPEC-102: Session Sidejacking
Session sidejacking takes advantage of an unencrypted communication channel between a victim and target system. The attacker sniffs traffic on a network looking for session tokens in unencrypted traffic. Once a session token is captured, the attacker performs malicious actions by using the stolen token with the targeted application to impersonate the victim. This attack is a specific method of session hijacking, which is exploiting a valid session token to gain unauthorized access to a target system or information. Other methods to perform a session hijacking are session fixation, cross-site scripting, or compromising a user or server machine and stealing the session token.