CWE-406: Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification)
Official CWE-406 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-406: Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification)
Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification) represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Amplification,DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart,DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU),DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory),DoS: Resource Consumption (Other): System resources can be quickly consumed leading to poor application performance or system crash. This may affect network performance and could be used to attack other systems and applications relying on network performance.
Developer Pattern
CWE-406 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-406, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-406: Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification)
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.
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.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This code listens on a port for DNS requests and sends the result to the requesting address. This code sends a DNS record to a requesting IP address. UDP allows the source IP address to be easily changed ('spoofed'), thus allowing an attacker to redirect responses to a target, which may be then be overwhelmed by the network traffic.
Remediation
- 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.
Detection
- 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.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.