CAPEC-489: SSL Flood
An adversary may execute a flooding attack using the SSL protocol with the intent to deny legitimate users access to a service by consuming all the available resources on the server side. These attacks take advantage of the asymmetric relationship between the processing power used by the client and the processing power used by the server to create a secure connection. In this manner the attacker can make a large number of HTTPS requests on a low provisioned machine to tie up a disproportionately large number of resources on the server. The clients then continue to keep renegotiating the SSL connection. When multiplied by a large number of attacking machines, this attack can result in a crash or loss of service to legitimate users.
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Overview
CAPEC-489 (SSL Flood) is a standard-level attack pattern catalogued by MITRE in the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC). It describes a recurring method attackers use to exploit software weaknesses.
What the attacker needs
Prerequisites
- This type of an attack requires the ability to generate a large amount of SSL traffic to send a target server.
How to mitigate it
Defenses that reduce the risk of CAPEC-489.
- To mitigate this type of an attack, an organization can create rule based filters to silently drop connections if too many are attempted in a certain time period.
Terminology & mappings
Mapped taxonomies
- ATTACK: Endpoint Denial of Service:Service Exhaustion Flood (1499.002)
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about CAPEC-489.
- What is CAPEC-489?
- An adversary may execute a flooding attack using the SSL protocol with the intent to deny legitimate users access to a service by consuming all the available resources on the server side. These attacks take advantage of the asymmetric relationship between the processing power used by the client and the processing power used by the server to create a secure connection. In this manner the attacker can make a large number of HTTPS requests on a low provisioned machine to tie up a disproportionately large number of resources on the server. The clients then continue to keep renegotiating the SSL connection. When multiplied by a large number of attacking machines, this attack can result in a crash or loss of service to legitimate users.
- How do you prevent CAPEC-489?
- To mitigate this type of an attack, an organization can create rule based filters to silently drop connections if too many are attempted in a certain time period.
- What weaknesses does CAPEC-489 target?
- CAPEC-489 exploits 1 CWE weakness, including CWE-770 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling).
References
Attack-pattern data is sourced from the MITRE CAPEC catalog (v3.9). Weakness associations link to the corresponding CWE entries on RadicalNotion.AI.
Defend against CAPEC-489
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