Introduction
The purpose of this assignment is to explore time of check to time of use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities and its protection methods.
In this lab, you will write a Java application using a buggy API. After exploiting that application, you will suggest a fix.
Part 0: The scenario and base program
You have to write a frontend for a command line shopping cart. The application (called ShoppingCart.java) has to:
- print the current balance of the user
- print the product list and their prices
- ask a product to buy
- check if the amount of credits is enough, if not stop the execution.
- otherwise, withdraw the price of the product from the wallet.
- add the name of the product to the pocket file.
- print the new balance.
- exit normally.
This is an example:
$ java ShoppingCart Your balance: 30000 credits pen 40 car 30000 candies 1 book 100 What you want to buy?: <insert a product name, e.g. pen> Your new balance is: 29960 credits $ cat pocket.txt book pen $ cat wallet.txt 29960We provide the backend here (the API is documented in the source code), which includes:
- Wallet.java: Interacts with the wallet.
- Pocket.java: Interacts with the pocket.
- Store.java: Interacts with the product options and prices.
Part 1: Exploit your program
The goal is to attack the program and exploit a race condition in this system. Can you get a car but paying less than its value? Obviously, it is not allowed to modify the files pocket.txt nor wallet.txt other than through the APIs.
- What is the shared resource? Who is sharing it?
- What is the root of the problem?
- Explain in detail how you can attack this system.
- Provide the program output and result, explaining the interleaving to achieve them.
Hint: it is allowed to artificially delay actions or to set break points to make the attack work reliably.
Part 2: Fix the API
The goal is to fix the API to avoid the vulnerability.
- Write a Wallet method implementing the necessary protections:
public void safeWithdraw(int valueToWithdraw) throws Exception
- Were there other APIs suffering from possible races? If so, please explain them and update the APIs to eliminate any race problems.
- Why are these protections enough?
- Make sure that your solution works outside any IDE you might use.
Report
Please, submit a report that includes in addition to your answers to the questions above:
- Part 0: your ShoppingCart.java with clear instructions for compile it and run it.
- Part 1: the output logs and explanations how to get them
- Part 2: the code that secures buggy API