CWE-925: Improper Verification of Intent by Broadcast Receiver
Official CWE-925 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-925: Intent Spoofing
Improper Verification of Intent by Broadcast Receiver represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: Another application can impersonate the operating system and cause the software to perform an unintended action.
Developer Pattern
CWE-925 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-925, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-925: Improper Verification of Intent by Broadcast Receiver
The Android application uses a Broadcast Receiver that receives an Intent but does not properly verify that the Intent came from an authorized source.
Certain types of Intents, identified by action string, can only be broadcast by the operating system itself, not by third-party applications. However, when an application registers to receive these implicit system intents, it is also registered to receive any explicit intents. While a malicious application cannot send an implicit system intent, it can send an explicit intent to the target application, which may assume that any received intent is a valid implicit system intent and not an explicit intent from another application. This may lead to unintended behavior.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness. The ShutdownReceiver class will handle the intent:,Because the method does not confirm that the intent action is the expected system intent, any received intent will trigger the shutdown procedure, as shown here:,An attacker can use this behavior to cause a denial of service.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Before acting on the Intent, check the Intent Action to make sure it matches the expected System action.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.