Token Replay or Reuse Attacks

Token replay or reuse attacks within the Expanding Control phase focus on the exploitation of service-to-service trust relationships by capturing and reusing authentication tokens that have been issued to legitimate users or services. After gaining initial access to a system, attackers intercept valid tokens (such as JWTs, OAuth tokens, or session cookies) from network traffic, storage, or memory dumps, then replay these captured credentials to impersonate legitimate entities and gain unauthorized access to downstream services and resources. This technique is particularly effective in microservice architectures or distributed systems where tokens may have broad permissions or long expiration times, allowing attackers to traverse through the application infrastructure by leveraging the established trust between interconnected services. The success of token replay attacks often stems from inadequate token validation mechanisms, missing or improper token binding to contexts like client IP or device fingerprints, or insufficient protection against token leakage across the service mesh.