High Impact And Or Medium Difficulty

Application-Level Denial of Service: High Impact or Medium Difficulty

Overview of the Vulnerability

Application-level Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are designed to deny service to users of an application by flooding it with many HTTP requests. This makes it impossible for the server to respond to legitimate requests in any practical time frame.

There is an application-level DoS vulnerability within this application that has high impact or medium difficulty to be performed. An attacker can use this vulnerability to exhaust resources, making the application unavailable for its designed purpose to legitimate users, but not take down the application for all users.

Business Impact

Application-level DoS can result in indirect financial loss for the business through the attacker’s ability to DoS the application. These malicious actions could also result in reputational damage for the business through the impact to customers’ trust.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Navigate to the following URL: {{url}}

  2. Use the following payload:

{{payload}}

  1. In the URL, insert the payload into the following parameter:

{{parameter}}

  1. Observe that the payload causes a denial of service that has high impact or medium difficulty to be performed

Proof of Concept (PoC)

The screenshot below demonstrates proof of the vulnerability:

{{screenshot}}

Recommendation(s)

It is recommended to perform input validation to limit the total request size, and file upload and extension sizes. and, It’s also important to prevent any user input based function or threading interaction. These preventative measures help against application-level DoS attacks.

For more information, refer to the following resources:

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