Analysis of CVE-2018-20718: Injection Vulnerability and Mitigation

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the CVE-2018-20718 vulnerability, specifically focusing on injection attacks. It details the nature of injection attacks, which involve injecting malicious code into legitimate data channels to alter the flow of control, potentially leading to data breaches, system control loss, and buffer overflows. The report outlines the technical impacts, including the ability to disclose sensitive information, bypass protection mechanisms, and alter execution logic. It also discusses non-technical impacts, such as the ability to hide malicious activities. Furthermore, the report suggests mitigation strategies, including using programming languages with built-in memory management features (like Java and Perl) and implementing whitelist and blacklist parsing to filter control-plane syntax from all input. The report also references relevant research papers that provide further context and analysis of this vulnerability and related security concerns.

CVE-2018-20718
VULNERABILITY TYPE: INJECTION

Introduction
 This type of vulnerability uses the injection
mode of the attack.
 This attack can lead to the loss of control of
the system
 The attack tries to change the flow of
control of the process of the system.
 This attack is frequently used and can be
used in a variety of forms.
 Some of the common ways to implement
this attack is by sending the malicious code
through legitimate data channels.

Vulnerability
 The vulnerability is of type injection.
The software is capable of injecting
the attacker controlled data plan into
the user controlled data plan.
 This injection attack can lead to many
parsing problems.
 This vulnerability can also cause
buffer overflows and many other
problems.
 The main vulnerability of this can lead
to system execution ability gain.

Scope Impact
Confidentiali
ty
Technical Impact: Read Application Data
More than one injection attacks is capable of disclosing sensitive
information and important useful data for further exploitation.
Access
Control
Technical Impact: Bypass Protection Mechanism
In few cases, the injection method also contains system control flow
changing codes that can result in loss of control.
Other
Technical Impact: Alter Execution Logic
Injection assaults are portrayed by the capacity to essentially
change the stream of a given procedure, and now and again, to the
execution of discretionary code.
Integrity
Other
Technical Impact: Other
Information injection assaults lead to loss of information integrity in
about all cases as the control-plane information infused is constantly
coincidental to information review or composing.
Non-
Repudiation
Technical Impact: Hide Activities
Most of the time, the activities performed by injection control code
are unlogged.
SCOPE AND VULNERABILITY

Mitigation and Patching
 The vulnerability can be patched by using
a programming language that cannot be
affected by such a vulnerability type.
 This type of language cannot be attacked
using this type of attack.
 The languages without this weakness are
Java and Perl which have their own
memory management feature.
 Another way is to implement whitelist and
blacklist parsing feature to parse the code.
 This can lead to filtering of control-plane
syntax from all input.

References
 Ma, S., Thung, F., Lo, D., Sun, C. and
Deng, R.H., 2017, September. Vurle:
Automatic vulnerability detection and
repair by learning from examples. In
European Symposium on Research in
Computer Security (pp. 229-246).
Springer, Cham.
 Ali, B. and Awad, A., 2018. Cyber and
physical security vulnerability
assessment for IoT-based smart
homes. Sensors, 18(3), p.817.