attack-surface.md

Attack Surface Analysis for veged/coa

Attack Surface: Command Injection (Indirect)

• Description: Applications using coa may become vulnerable to command injection if they utilize user-provided arguments (parsed by coa) to construct and execute system commands without proper sanitization. coa acts as the entry point for potentially malicious input that can be leveraged for command injection.
• How coa Contributes: coa parses command-line arguments, making user-controlled input accessible to the application. This parsed input, if not handled securely by the application, becomes the vector for injecting malicious commands when used in shell executions.
• Example: An attacker provides a crafted argument via the command line that, after being parsed by coa, is used by the application in a child_process.exec() call, injecting arbitrary shell commands.
• Impact: Full system compromise, arbitrary code execution, data exfiltration, denial of service.
• Risk Severity: Critical
• Mitigation Strategies:
  • Strict Input Validation and Sanitization (Application-Side): Thoroughly validate and sanitize all arguments obtained from coa before using them in any system command construction. Employ whitelisting and escape potentially harmful characters.
  • Avoid Shell Execution (Application-Side): Prefer using safer alternatives to shell execution, such as child_process.spawn with arguments array, or libraries that directly interact with system functionalities without invoking a shell.
  • Parameterization/Argument Quoting (Application-Side): If shell execution is unavoidable, use parameterization or argument quoting mechanisms provided by the shell environment to prevent injection.
  • Principle of Least Privilege (Application-Side): Run the application with minimal necessary privileges to limit the impact of successful command injection.

Attack Surface: Path Traversal (Indirect)

• Description: Applications utilizing coa to parse file path arguments are susceptible to path traversal vulnerabilities if they fail to properly validate and sanitize these paths before file system operations. coa provides the user-controlled input that can be exploited for path traversal.
• How coa Contributes: coa facilitates the intake of user-provided file paths via command-line arguments. If the application directly uses these parsed paths for file access without validation, coa indirectly enables the attack surface by providing the input mechanism.
• Example: An attacker provides a malicious path like ../../../../etc/passwd as a command-line argument that is parsed by coa. If the application uses this path directly to read a file, it could lead to unauthorized access to sensitive system files.
• Impact: Unauthorized access to sensitive files, information disclosure, potential for arbitrary file read or write depending on application logic.
• Risk Severity: High
• Mitigation Strategies:
  • Robust Path Validation and Sanitization (Application-Side): Validate all file paths derived from coa arguments. Ensure paths are canonicalized and restricted to the intended directories.
  • Path Canonicalization (Application-Side): Use secure path resolution functions (e.g., path.resolve in Node.js) to canonicalize paths and verify they remain within allowed boundaries.
  • Restrict File System Access (Application-Side): Limit the application's file system permissions to only the necessary directories, reducing the potential impact of path traversal.

Attack Surface: Denial of Service (DoS) via Argument Overload

• Description: coa's argument parsing process can be targeted for Denial of Service attacks. By providing an excessive number of arguments, extremely long arguments, or deeply nested argument structures, an attacker can consume excessive resources (CPU, memory) during parsing, leading to application unresponsiveness or crashes. coa's parsing mechanism becomes the direct target.
• How coa Contributes: coa is the component responsible for processing and parsing command-line arguments. Its parsing logic and resource consumption during parsing are directly involved in this attack surface.
• Example: An attacker floods the application with requests containing thousands of command-line arguments or arguments with extremely long string values. coa attempts to parse these, leading to CPU and memory exhaustion and application DoS.
• Impact: Application unavailability, service disruption, resource exhaustion, impacting legitimate users.
• Risk Severity: High
• Mitigation Strategies:
  • Implement Argument Limits (Application-Level, potentially coa-configurable): Set limits on the number of arguments, argument length, and complexity that the application (or coa if configurable) will process.
  • Rate Limiting (Application-Level): If the application is exposed via a network interface, implement rate limiting to restrict the rate of requests processing command-line arguments.
  • Resource Monitoring and Alerting (Application-Level): Monitor application resource usage (CPU, memory) to detect and respond to potential DoS attacks.
  • Input Rejection (Application-Level): Implement early checks to reject requests with excessively large or complex argument sets before they are fully parsed by coa, saving resources.

Attack Surface: Configuration Injection/Manipulation via Arguments

• Description: If applications use coa-parsed arguments to configure critical settings without proper validation, attackers can manipulate these arguments to inject malicious configurations or alter intended application behavior. coa serves as the input channel for potentially malicious configuration data.
• How coa Contributes: coa provides the mechanism for receiving configuration parameters through command-line arguments. It makes these parameters available to the application for configuration purposes. If the application trusts these arguments without validation, coa becomes the entry point for configuration injection.
• Example: An attacker manipulates a command-line argument (parsed by coa) that controls logging levels or security settings, potentially disabling security features or injecting malicious configurations that alter application behavior.
• Impact: Security bypass, unauthorized access, data manipulation, application malfunction, privilege escalation.
• Risk Severity: Critical
• Mitigation Strategies:
  • Strict Configuration Validation (Application-Side): Rigorous validation of all configuration parameters derived from coa arguments against expected values, types, and ranges. Use whitelisting and sanitization.
  • Secure Defaults (Application-Side): Ensure secure default configurations are in place. Overriding defaults should require explicit and validated input.
  • Principle of Least Authority for Configuration (Application-Side): Limit the scope of configuration changes allowed through command-line arguments. Critical configurations should be managed through more secure and controlled mechanisms.
  • Avoid Sensitive Configuration via Command Line (Application-Side): Never expose highly sensitive configuration parameters (e.g., secrets, API keys) directly via command-line arguments. Use secure secret management practices.

Attack Surface: Argument Parsing Logic Bugs in coa (Library Vulnerability)

• Description: Vulnerabilities or bugs within the coa library itself can lead to unexpected or incorrect parsing of command-line arguments. This can result in the application receiving and processing arguments in a way that was not intended, potentially leading to security vulnerabilities or unexpected behavior. The vulnerability resides directly within coa.
• How coa Contributes: coa is the core component responsible for argument parsing. Any bugs or vulnerabilities in its parsing logic directly affect the security and reliability of applications that depend on it.
• Example: A hypothetical bug in coa might cause it to misinterpret a specific combination of arguments, leading to a different argument value being passed to the application than what the user intended. This could bypass security checks or trigger unintended application logic.
• Impact: Unpredictable application behavior, potential security vulnerabilities, denial of service, information disclosure, depending on the nature of the bug and how the application relies on parsed arguments.
• Risk Severity: High
• Mitigation Strategies:
  • Keep coa Updated (Library-Level & Application-Level): Maintain coa library at the latest version to benefit from bug fixes and security patches. Regularly monitor for security advisories related to coa.
  • Dependency Scanning (Application-Level): Use dependency scanning tools to automatically identify known vulnerabilities in coa and other dependencies.
  • Thorough Application Testing (Application-Level): Thoroughly test the application's argument handling logic, including edge cases and unexpected inputs, to identify any issues arising from coa's parsing behavior.
  • Input Sanitization and Validation (Application-Side): Even with an updated library, always sanitize and validate the parsed arguments within the application as a defense-in-depth measure against potential parsing bugs or unexpected behavior from coa.