Evil Pickles: DoS Attacks Based on Object-Graph Engineering∗ Jens Dietrich1, Kamil Jezek2, Shawn Rasheed3, Amjed Tahir4, and Alex Potanin5 1 School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand
[email protected] 2 NTIS – New Technologies for the Information Society Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia Pilsen, Czech Republic
[email protected] 3 School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand
[email protected] 4 School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand
[email protected] 5 School of Engineering and Computer Science Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected] Abstract In recent years, multiple vulnerabilities exploiting the serialisation APIs of various programming languages, including Java, have been discovered. These vulnerabilities can be used to devise in- jection attacks, exploiting the presence of dynamic programming language features like reflection or dynamic proxies. In this paper, we investigate a new type of serialisation-related vulnerabilit- ies for Java that exploit the topology of object graphs constructed from classes of the standard library in a way that deserialisation leads to resource exhaustion, facilitating denial of service attacks. We analyse three such vulnerabilities that can be exploited to exhaust stack memory, heap memory and CPU time. We discuss the language and library design features that enable these vulnerabilities, and investigate whether these vulnerabilities can be ported to C#, Java- Script and Ruby. We present two case studies that demonstrate how the vulnerabilities can be used in attacks on two widely used servers, Jenkins deployed on Tomcat and JBoss.