Attack Surface: Message Injection/Spoofing within Skynet Network
- Description: Exploiting Skynet's message passing architecture to inject or spoof messages between services. This leverages the inherent trust within the Skynet internal network.
- Skynet Contribution: Skynet's core design relies on inter-service message passing without enforced, built-in authentication or authorization at the framework level. This design choice creates an implicit trust zone that can be exploited if network access is gained or a service is compromised.
- Example: An attacker gains access to the internal network where Skynet services communicate. They craft a message that appears to originate from a legitimate service (e.g., a monitoring service) and send it to a critical service (e.g., a database service), instructing it to perform a destructive action based on the spoofed authority.
- Impact: Service disruption, data corruption, unauthorized actions, privilege escalation, Denial of Service.
- Risk Severity: High
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Network Segmentation: Isolate the Skynet internal network.
- Service Authentication and Authorization: Implement application-level authentication and authorization for inter-service communication. Use secure tokens or message signing.
- Input Validation and Sanitization: Services must validate all incoming messages, even from within the Skynet network.
Attack Surface: Message Queue Overflow/Flooding
- Description: Overwhelming Skynet services by flooding their message queues, leading to Denial of Service.
- Skynet Contribution: Skynet's message queue mechanism, while efficient, can become a point of vulnerability if an attacker can send a high volume of messages. Skynet itself doesn't provide default, global rate limiting for incoming messages across all services.
- Example: An attacker targets a resource-intensive Skynet service. They send a flood of messages to this service, filling its message queue and consuming its processing capacity. Legitimate messages are delayed or dropped, effectively causing a Denial of Service for that service and potentially impacting dependent services.
- Impact: Denial of Service (DoS) against specific services or the entire Skynet application.
- Risk Severity: High
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Message Queue Limits: Configure appropriate message queue limits per service.
- Rate Limiting at Ingress Points: Implement rate limiting at points where external input enters the Skynet system.
- Message Prioritization and Dropping: Implement message prioritization and consider dropping less critical messages under heavy load.
- Resource Monitoring and Alerting: Monitor message queue lengths and resource usage to detect and respond to flooding attempts.
Attack Surface: Service Impersonation/Name Collision
- Description: Exploiting weaknesses in Skynet's service registration or discovery to impersonate a legitimate service.
- Skynet Contribution: Skynet's service registry and discovery are fundamental. If service naming is predictable or registration is not secured, attackers can register malicious services with names intended for legitimate ones, intercepting communication.
- Example: An attacker reverse engineers the naming scheme for critical Skynet services. They then register a service with the same name as a vital service (e.g., a configuration service). When other services attempt to communicate with the legitimate configuration service, they are instead directed to the attacker's malicious service, potentially receiving false configurations or leaking sensitive data.
- Impact: Data interception, data manipulation, service disruption, potential for man-in-the-middle attacks within the Skynet application.
- Risk Severity: High
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Secure Service Registration: Implement authenticated and authorized service registration.
- Unique and Unpredictable Service IDs: Use UUIDs or hash-based IDs instead of predictable names for service identification.
- Service ID Validation: Services should validate the identity of communicating services based on secure IDs, not just names.
- Centralized Service Registry with Access Control: Use a secure, centralized service registry with strict access control.
Attack Surface: Vulnerabilities in Skynet C Core
- Description: Exploiting memory safety or logic vulnerabilities within the core C codebase of the Skynet framework.
- Skynet Contribution: Skynet's core is written in C, which is prone to memory safety issues. Vulnerabilities in the core directly impact all applications built on Skynet, as all services rely on this core.
- Example: A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in Skynet's message parsing logic within the C core. An attacker crafts a specially malformed message that, when processed by the core, overflows a buffer, allowing for arbitrary code execution within the Skynet process, potentially gaining full control of the system.
- Impact: Arbitrary code execution at system level, Denial of Service (DoS), system compromise, complete application takeover.
- Risk Severity: Critical
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Regular Security Audits and Code Reviews: Conduct thorough security audits and code reviews of the Skynet C core.
- Fuzzing and Static Analysis: Utilize fuzzing and static analysis tools to proactively find vulnerabilities.
- Upstream Security Patches: Stay updated with Skynet releases and apply security patches immediately.
- Memory Safety Practices: Enforce strict memory safety practices in any modifications to the Skynet C core.
Attack Surface: Insecure Service Management Operations
- Description: Gaining unauthorized access to Skynet's service management functionalities to disrupt or compromise the application.
- Skynet Contribution: Skynet provides mechanisms to manage services (start, stop, restart). If these management interfaces, even if application-defined, are not properly secured, they become a high-value target for attackers to control the Skynet application's behavior.
- Example: An application built on Skynet exposes a web interface for managing services, but lacks proper authentication or authorization. An attacker discovers this interface and uses it to stop critical services, restart services with altered configurations, or deploy malicious services within the running Skynet application, leading to a complete compromise.
- Impact: Service disruption, complete application compromise, potential for persistent malicious presence, data breaches.
- Risk Severity: Critical
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Secure Management Interfaces: Secure all service management interfaces with strong authentication (MFA recommended) and robust authorization.
- Principle of Least Privilege: Grant access to management operations only to authorized administrators.
- Audit Logging: Implement comprehensive audit logging for all management actions.
- Network Isolation: Isolate management interfaces to trusted networks, avoiding public internet exposure.