What’s your availability? DoS attacks and more

A colleague of mine recently asked me about protection from DoS attacks[1] for a project with which he’s involved – Denial of Service attacks.  The first thing that sprung to mind, of course, was DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where hundreds or thousands[2] of hosts are used to send vast amounts of network traffic to – or maybe more accurately “at” – servers in the hopes of bringing the servers to their knees and stopping them providing the service for which they’re designed.  These are the attacks that get into the news, and with good reason.

There are other types of DoS however, and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether he – and I – should be worrying about these other DoS attacks and also considering other related types of issue which could cause problems to systems.  And because I realised it was an interesting topic, I decided to write about it[3].

I’m going to return to the classic “C.I.A.” model of computer security: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.  The attacks we’re talking about here are those most often overlooked: attempts to degrade the availability of a service.  There’s an overlap with the related discipline of resilience here, but I think that the key differentiator is that in security we’re generally talking about intentional degradation of availability, whereas resilience also covers (and maybe focuses on) unintentional degradation.

So, what types of availability attacks might we want to consider?

Denial of service attacks

I think it’s worth linking to Wikipedia’s pretty awesome entry “Denial of service attack” – not something I often do, but I thought it was excellent.  Although they’re not mutually exclusive at all, here are some of the key types as I’d define them:

• Distributed DoS – where you have lots of different hosts attacking at the same time, flooding the target with traffic.  These days, this can be easily automated, and it’s possible to rent compromised machines to perform a coordinated attack.
• Application layer – where the attack is aimed at the service, rather than at the host beneath.  This may seem like an academic distinction, but it’s not: what it really means is that the attack is performed with knowledge of the application layer.  So, for instance, if you’re attacking a web server, you might initiate lots of HTTP sessions, or if you were attacking a Kerberos server, you might request lots of authentication tickets.  These types of attacks may be quite costly to perform, but they’re also difficult to protect against, as each attack looks like a “legal” interaction with the service, and unless you’re on the look-out in a way which is typically not automated at this level, they’re difficult to avoid.
• Host level – this is a family of attacks which go for the host and/or associated Operating System, rather than the service itself.  A classic attack would be the SYN flood, which misused the TCP protocol to use up resources on the host, thereby stopping any associated services from being able to respond.  Host attacks may be somewhat simpler to defend against, as it’s easier to invest in logic to detect them at this level (or maybe “set of layers”, if we adopt the OSI model), and to correlate responses across different hosts.  Firewalls and similar defences are also more likely to be able to be configured to help defend hosts which may be targeted.

Resource starvation

The term “resource starvation” most accurately refers[4] to situations where a process (or application) is denied sufficient CPU allocation to perform correctly.  How could this occur?  Well, it’s going to be rarer than in the DoS case, because in order to do it, you’re going to need some way to impact the underlying scheduling of the Operating System and/or virtualisation management (think hypervisor, typically).  That would normally mean that you’d need pretty low-level access to the machine, but there is a family of attacks known as “noisy neighbour”[5] where workloads – VMs or containers, typically – use up so many resources that other workloads are starved.

However, partly because of this case, I’d argue that resource starvation can usefully be associated with other types of availability attacks which occur locally to the machine hosting the targeted service, which might be related to CPU, file descriptor, network or other resources.

Generally, noisy neighbour attacks can be fairly easily mitigated by controls in the Operating System or virtualisation manager, though, of course, compromised or malicious components at this layer are very difficult to manage.

 

Dependency blocking

I’m not sure what the best term for this type of attack is, but what I’m thinking of is attacks which impact a service by reducing or removing access to external services on which they depend – remote components, if you will.  If, for instance, my web application requires access to a database, then an attack on that database – however performed – will impact my service.  As almost any kind of service will have external dependencies these days[6], this is can be a very effective attack, as it allows knowledgeable attackers to target the weakest link in the “chain” of components that make up your service.

There are mitigations against some of these attacks – caching and later reconciliation/synching being one – but identifying and defending against these sorts of attacks depends largely on considering your service as a system, and realising the types of impact degradation of the different parts might have.

 

Conclusion – managed degradation

Which leads me to a final point, which is that when considering availability attacks, understanding and planning Service degradation: actually a good thing is going to be invaluable – and when you’ve done that, you’ll definitely going to need to test it, too (If it isn’t tested, it doesn’t work).

 

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1 – yes, I checked the capitalisation – he wasn’t worried about DRDOS, MS-DOS or any of those lovely 80s era command line Operating Systems.

2 – or millions or more, these days.

3 – here, for the avoidance of doubt.

4 – I believe.

5 – you know my policy on spellings by now.  I’m British, and we’ll keep it that way.

6 – unless you’re still using green-screen standalone machines to run your business, in which case either a) yikes or b) well done.