CAPEC-147: XML Ping of the Death

Description
An attacker initiates a resource depletion attack where a large number of small XML messages are delivered at a sufficiently rapid rate to cause a denial of service or crash of the target. Transactions such as repetitive SOAP transactions can deplete resources faster than a simple flooding attack because of the additional resources used by the SOAP protocol and the resources necessary to process SOAP messages. The transactions used are immaterial as long as they cause resource utilization on the target. In other words, this is a normal flooding attack augmented by using messages that will require extra processing on the target.
Extended Description

Many applications allow users to send email messages by filling in fields. For example, a web site may have a link to "share this site with a friend" where the user provides the recipient's email address and the web application fills out all the other fields, such as the subject and body. In this pattern, an adversary adds header and body information to an email message by injecting additional content in an input field used to construct a header of the mail message. This attack takes advantage of the fact that RFC 822 requires that headers in a mail message be separated by a carriage return. As a result, an adversary can inject new headers or content simply by adding a delimiting carriage return and then supplying the new heading and body information. This attack will not work if the user can only supply the message body since a carriage return in the body is treated as a normal character.

Severity :

Medium

Possibility :

Low

Type :

Detailed
Relationships with other CAPECs

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

CAPEC-528: XML Flood XML Flood
Prerequisites

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • The target must receive and process XML transactions.
Skills required

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • Low To send small XML messages
  • High To use distributed network to launch the attack
Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

Resources required

Transaction generator(s)/source(s) and ability to cause arrival of messages at the target with sufficient rapidity to overload target. Larger targets may be able to handle large volumes of requests so the attacker may require significant resources (such as a distributed network) to affect the target. However, the resources required of the attacker would be less than in the case of a simple flooding attack against the same target.

Related CWE

A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful.

CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Visit http://capec.mitre.org/ for more details.