Testing for HTTP Parameter pollution (OTG-INPVAL-004)

This article is part of the new OWASP Testing Guide v4.

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Brief Summary

Supplying multiple HTTP parameters with the same name may cause an application to interpret values in unanticipated ways. By exploiting these effects, an attacker may be able to bypass input validation, trigger application errors, or modify internal variables values.

Description of the Issue

Current HTTP standards do not include guidance on how to interpret multiple input parameters with the same name. Without a standard in place, web applications handle this edge case in a variety of ways (see the table below for details). It is not necessarily an indication of vulnerability when an application server responds to multiple similar parameters; this is expected behavior for handling an unusual input. The vulnerability depends if an one can abuse the concatenation or substitution of variable values to cause errors or bypass validation.

For example, when HTTP Parameter Pollution was first identified, a flaw was identified using the ModSecurity SQL Injection filter. The ModSecurity filter would correctly blacklist the following string: "select 1,2,3 from table." The filter would block this example URL from being processed by the web server: /index.aspx?page=select 1,2,3 from table.

However, by exploiting the concatenation of multiple HTTP parameters, an attacker could cause the application server to concatenate the string after the ModSecurity filter already accepted the input. As an example, the URL /index.aspx?page=select 1&page=2,3 from table would not trigger the ModSecurity filter, yet the application layer would concatenate the input back into the full malicious string.

Given the URL and querystring: http://example.com/?color=red&color=blue

Web Application Server Backend	Parsing Result	Example
ASP.NET / IIS	All occurrences concatenated with a comma	color=red,blue
ASP / IIS	All occurrences concatenated with a comma	color=red,blue
PHP / Apache	Last occurrence only	color=blue
PHP / Zeus	Last occurrence only	color=blue
JSP, Servlet / Apache Tomcat	First occurrence only	color=red
JSP, Servlet / Oracle Application Server 10g	First occurrence only	color=red
JSP, Servlet / Jetty	First occurrence only	color=red
IBM Lotus Domino	Last occurrence only	color=blue
IBM HTTP Server	First occurrence only	color=red
mod_perl, libapreq2 / Apache	First occurrence only	color=red
Perl CGI / Apache	First occurrence only	color=red
mod_wsgi (Python) / Apache	First occurrence only	color=red
Python / Zope	All occurrences in List data type	color=['red','blue']

(source: Media:AppsecEU09_CarettoniDiPaola_v0.8.pdf )

Black Box testing and example

Testing for Topic X vulnerabilities:
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