COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-147

XML Ping of the Death

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.

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

Medium

Likelihood of attack

Low

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

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.

Execution flow

How does the attack proceed, step by step?

1

Explore

Survey the target

Using a browser or an automated tool, an attacker records all instance of web services to process XML requests.

Techniques used

  • Use an automated tool to record all instances of URLs to process XML requests.
  • Use a browser to manually explore the website and analyze how the application processes XML requests.
2

Exploit

Launch a resource depletion attack

The attacker delivers a large number of small XML messages to the target URLs found in the explore phase at a sufficiently rapid rate. It causes denial of service to the target application.

Techniques used

  • Send a large number of crafted small XML messages to the target URL.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

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

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.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Resource Consumption

Affected scopes: Availability

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
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.
2
Implementation: Provide for network flow control and traffic shaping to control access to the resources.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail
Consider the case of attack performed against the createCustomerBillingAccount Web Service for an online store. In this case, the createCustomerBillingAccount Web Service receives a huge number of simultaneous requests, containing nonsense billing account creation information (the small XML messages). The createCustomerBillingAccount Web Services may forward the messages to other Web Services for processing. The application suffers from a high load of requests, potentially leading to a complete loss of availability the involved Web Service.