Event Handler Poisoning: Attacks and Defenses Anonymous Anonymous
[email protected] Abstract—The software development community has begun to are the first to examine the security implications of using the adopt the Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) to provide scalable EDA at a software architecture-level. In xIII we describe a web services. Though the Event-Driven Architecture can offer new Denial of Service attack that can be used against EDA- better scalability than the One Thread Per Client Architecture, based services. Our Event Handler Poisoning attack identifies its use exposes service providers to a Denial of Service attack the most important limited resource in the EDA: the Event that we call Event Handler Poisoning (EHP). With the rise in the Handlers themselves. use of the EDA may come a plague of EHP attacks threatening critical Internet services. The EDA’s scalability is also its Achilles’ heel. Multiplex- In this work we define EHP attacks, dividing them into ing unrelated work onto the same thread reduces overhead, two types, CPU-bound and I/O-bound. After examining EHP but it also moves the burden of time sharing out of the thread vulnerabilities in the popular Node.js EDA framework and open- library or operating system and into the application itself. source npm modules, we explore two representative EHP attacks Where OTPCA-based services can rely on the preemptive in detail: Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) and I/O- multitasking promised by the underlying system to ensure based Denial of Service (IODoS). that resources are shared fairly, using the EDA requires the Using our Constant Worst-Case Execution Time (C-WCET) service to enforce its own cooperative multitasking [48].