Attack Surface: 1. Protocol Parsing and Handling Vulnerabilities
- Description: Flaws in how bRPC itself parses and handles incoming requests for its supported protocols (bRPC, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, gRPC). This is about vulnerabilities within the bRPC protocol implementation.
- incubator-brpc Contribution: bRPC is directly responsible for the implementation and handling of these protocols. This is the core attack surface.
- Example: An attacker sends a specially crafted HTTP/2 request with an invalid header frame that triggers a buffer overflow in bRPC's own parsing code, leading to a crash or RCE. A malformed bRPC-specific request exploiting a bug in bRPC's internal handling.
- Impact: Denial-of-Service (DoS), Remote Code Execution (RCE), Information Disclosure.
- Risk Severity: Critical
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Fuzz Testing (bRPC Core): Focus fuzzing efforts directly on bRPC's protocol implementations. This requires understanding bRPC's internal structure and creating targeted fuzzers.
- Regular Updates: Keep bRPC updated to the absolute latest version. Security patches are often released to address protocol-level vulnerabilities.
- Protocol Selection: If possible, and if security is paramount, favor gRPC or HTTP/2 (with TLS) as they are generally more robustly designed than older protocols. This reduces the inherent protocol risk.
- WAF/Protocol Gateway (Custom Rules): If possible, use a WAF or gateway that can be configured with custom rules to understand and filter bRPC traffic at a deeper level than generic HTTP filtering.
Attack Surface: 2. Protobuf Deserialization Exploits (within bRPC)
- Description: Vulnerabilities arising from bRPC's internal use and handling of Protocol Buffers (protobuf) for its own operations. This is distinct from the application's use of protobuf.
- incubator-brpc Contribution: bRPC uses protobuf internally. Vulnerabilities in this internal usage are directly attributable to bRPC.
- Example: A vulnerability in how bRPC deserializes protobuf messages used for internal communication between bRPC components (e.g., for load balancing or service discovery) could be exploited. This is not about user-provided protobuf data.
- Impact: Denial-of-Service (DoS), Remote Code Execution (RCE) (potentially with higher privileges if exploiting internal components).
- Risk Severity: Critical
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Protobuf Library Updates (for bRPC): Ensure that the protobuf library used by bRPC itself is always up-to-date. This might involve rebuilding bRPC from source if necessary.
- Code Audits (bRPC Internals): Security audits of bRPC's source code, specifically focusing on its internal use of protobuf, are crucial.
- Fuzz Testing (Internal bRPC Communication): If possible, develop fuzzing strategies that target the internal communication channels of bRPC that use protobuf.
Attack Surface: 3. Resource Exhaustion (bRPC Core)
- Description: Attackers can overwhelm bRPC's internal mechanisms by sending crafted requests, consuming resources, or exploiting connection management vulnerabilities within bRPC itself.
- incubator-brpc Contribution: bRPC's connection pooling, asynchronous processing, and internal resource management are directly controlled by the framework.
- Example: An attacker exploits a flaw in bRPC's connection handling logic to cause a large number of connections to remain open, exhausting resources even if the application has rate limiting. Another example: triggering excessive memory allocation within bRPC's internal buffers.
- Impact: Denial-of-Service (DoS).
- Risk Severity: High
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Configuration Tuning (bRPC): Carefully review and tune bRPC's configuration options related to connection limits, timeouts, thread pools, and memory allocation. Use conservative settings.
- Monitoring (bRPC Internals): Monitor bRPC's internal metrics (if exposed) to detect unusual resource consumption patterns. This might require custom monitoring solutions.
- Code Audits (Resource Management): Security audits of bRPC's source code, focusing on its resource management and connection handling, are important.