COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-469

HTTP DoS

An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.

Abstraction

Standard

Typical severity

Low

Likelihood of attack

Medium

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

  • HTTP protocol is usedWeb server used is vulnerable to denial of service via HTTP flooding

Skills required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Resources required

  • Ability to issues hundreds of HTTP requests

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
Configuration: Configure web server software to limit the waiting period on opened HTTP sessions
2
Design: Use load balancing mechanisms