Preventing Malicious Request Loops
The web is an collaborative ecosystem. Web standards exist to ensure that participants of the network behave in a predictable way. If network participants deviate from the established standards then there can be unintended consequences. This blog post is about one of these unintended consequences.
A group of researchers recently published a paper "Forwarding Loop Attacks in the Content Delivery Networks" describing what can happen when web services interact in a non-compliant way. They describe an attack where a malicious user can force multiple service providers to send each other an unending stream of requests in a loop. This request loop can result in resource exhaustion and denial of service at the service provider. This paper also demonstrated that the attack is practical, and can be performed using a large list of service providers.
CloudFlare's service has been modified to be standards-compliant with respect to HTTP proxying. However, fixing the vulnerability that enables this attack requires all proxy services to conform to the same standards. If even one service provider is non-compliant, the attack can still be carried out against compliant services. In this post, we will describe the attack and explain how a proxy services can go from being Continue reading