As described in [20], the metadata spoofing attack aims at maliciously reengineering a Web Services’ metadata descriptions.
For instance, an adversary may modify a service’s
WSDL so that a call to a deleteUser operation syntactically looks like a call to another operation, e.g. setAdminRights. Thus, once a user is given such a modified WSDL document, each of his deleteUser operation invocations will result in SOAP messages that at the server side look like—and thus are interpreted as—invocations of the setAdminRights operation. In the end, an adversary could manage to create a bunch of user logins that are thought to be deleted by the application’s semantics, but in reality are still valid, and additionally are provided with administrator level access rights