CAPEC-147 — XML Ping of the Death
CAPEC-147: XML Ping of the Death
MITRE CAPEC attack pattern
| Status | Draft |
| Typical severity | Medium |
| Likelihood of attack | Low |
| Catalogue | CAPEC 3.9 (2023-01-24) |
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.
Where this sits in the chain
A finding maps to a weakness (CWE), a weakness is exploited by an attack pattern (CAPEC), and an attack pattern shows up in ATT&CK as observed adversary behaviour. This page is the middle hop.
Weaknesses exploited: CWE-400, CWE-770
Prerequisites
- The target must receive and process XML transactions.
Skills required
- Low: To send small XML messages
- High: To use distributed network to launch the attack
Consequences
- Availability: Resource Consumption
Mitigations
- Design: Build throttling mechanism into the resource allocation. Provide for a timeout mechanism for allocated resources whose transaction does not complete within a specified interval.
- Implementation: Provide for network flow control and traffic shaping to control access to the resources.