Re: Overlapping ranges

Hello Julian,

On Saturday 11 October 2008, Julian Reschke wrote:
> V13 wrote:
> > Allowing overlapping ranges permits the client side to request more data
> > than the largest file available at the server side. It is trivial to
> > construct a 100MB file request from 200 overlapping partial requests of a
> > 500K file. This allows the TCP optimistic ACK attack [1] to be performed
> > on web servers all over the world.
>
> I agree that this is a nice DOS scenario, but wouldn't it be possible to
> do the same just with a bunch of concurrent, repeating GET requests on
> the same URI?

Indeed, repeated GET requests will have the same result but they will be a bit 
less robust. For every repeated request that the client side transmits there 
is a (not so small) possibility of the request being lost. If this problem is 
of size X then it is practically multiplied by the number of repeated ranges 
that the client side may request.

Also, I can't think of a method for avoiding repeated requests without making 
the server side somehow vulnerable to a connection with 1 million 1-byte 
requests, unless there is a maximum request limit.

p.s.1 This attack also affects proxies.
p.s.2 IIS seems to limit the number of ranges per request to ~5 (I don't 
remember the exact number).

Received on Sunday, 12 October 2008 18:22:36 UTC