Authority forgery

A fabricated grant or approval claims a permission that no accountable origin issued.

01 / Attack path

How the boundary is crossed

An agent inserts a forged approval identifier into a payment request after the finance reviewer denied it.

Attack path and interception point
  1. 01Lower-trust input
  2. 02Attempted instruction
  3. 03Protected action
  4. 04Enforced decision

02 / Containment

Where bounded authority limits the effect

Validate issuer, integrity, subject, exact action, target, expiry and consumption state at the payment boundary.

03 / Failure and evidence

The attacker’s opportunity and the defender’s record

Exploit condition

The executor accepts a syntactically plausible approval ID without resolving its trusted issuer and scope.

Evidence to retain

Retain presented grant reference, validation failure, attempted transfer and actual bank state.

04 / Canonical scope

Why this reference stands alone

Chain tampering changes an existing delegation path; this threat fabricates an authority artifact.

Protocol or attack trace

Forged approval trace

Sequence

Payment agent submits a fabricated approval ID after the reviewer denied the transfer.

Negative test

Resolve ID from trusted issuer, verify subject, payee, amount and unused state; reject unknown ID.

Primary references

Read the underlying material

Architecture discussion

Choose one consequential action and make its boundary explicit.

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