| Name |
HTTP Flood |
|
| Likelyhood of attack |
Typical severity |
| Low |
High |
|
| Summary |
An adversary may execute a flooding attack using the HTTP protocol with the intent to deny legitimate users access to a service by consuming resources at the application layer such as web services and their infrastructure. These attacks use legitimate session-based HTTP GET requests designed to consume large amounts of a server's resources. Since these are legitimate sessions this attack is very difficult to detect. |
| Prerequisites |
This type of an attack requires the ability to generate a large amount of HTTP traffic to send to a target server. |
| Solutions | To mitigate this type of an attack, an organization can monitor the typical traffic flow. When spikes in usage occur, filters could examine traffic for indicators of bad behavior with respect to the web servers, and then create firewall rules to deny the malicious IP addresses. These patterns in the filter could be a combination of trained behavior, knowledge of standards as they apply to the web server, known patterns, or anomaly detection. Firewalling source IPs works since the HTTP is sent using TCP so the source IP can't be spoofed; if the source IP is spoofed is, then it's not legitimate traffic. Special care should be taken care with rule sets to ensure low false positive rates along with a method at the application layer to allow a valid user to begin using the service again. Another possible solution is using 3rd party providers as they have experts, knowledge, experience, and resources to deal with the attack and mitigate it before hand or while it occurs. The best mitigation is preparation before an attack, but there is no bulletproof solution as with ample resources a brute force attack may succeed. |
| Related Weaknesses |
|
CWE ID
|
Description
|
| CWE-770 |
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling |
|
| Related CAPECS |
|
CAPEC ID
|
Description
|
| CAPEC-125 |
An adversary consumes the resources of a target by rapidly engaging in a large number of interactions with the target. This type of attack generally exposes a weakness in rate limiting or flow. When successful this attack prevents legitimate users from accessing the service and can cause the target to crash. This attack differs from resource depletion through leaks or allocations in that the latter attacks do not rely on the volume of requests made to the target but instead focus on manipulation of the target's operations. The key factor in a flooding attack is the number of requests the adversary can make in a given period of time. The greater this number, the more likely an attack is to succeed against a given target. |
|
| Taxonomy: ATTACK |
|
Entry ID
|
Entry Name
|
| 1499.002 |
Endpoint Denial of Service:Service Exhaustion Flood |
|