Weakness · Medium
CWE-406: Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification)
What it is
The product does not sufficiently monitor or control transmitted network traffic volume, so that an actor can cause the product to transmit more traffic than should be allowed for that actor.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
- Exploited in the wild
- 1 known exploited CVE
In more detail
In the absence of a policy to restrict asymmetric resource consumption, the application or system cannot distinguish between legitimate transmissions and traffic intended to serve as an amplifying attack on target systems. Systems can often be configured to restrict the amount of traffic sent out on behalf of a client, based on the client's origin or access level. This is usually defined in a resource allocation policy. In the absence of a mechanism to keep track of transmissions, the system or application can be easily abused to transmit asymmetrically greater traffic than the request or client should be permitted to.
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Amplification (Availability)
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU) (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory) (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Other) (Availability)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- An application must make network resources available to a client commensurate with the client's access level.
Policy
- Define a clear policy for network resource allocation and consumption.
Implementation
- An application must, at all times, keep track of network resources and meter their usage appropriately.
How to find it
- Automated Static Analysis. Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Exploited in the wild: 1 CVE
Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-406 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.
H2 Security
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.