Threat: Malicious Stream Injection
An attacker publishes a crafted stream to SRS, exploiting vulnerabilities in SRS's stream parsing or processing. This can cause buffer overflows or memory corruption within SRS, potentially leading to remote code execution or denial of service on the SRS server.
An attacker floods the SRS server with a massive number of streams or high-bandwidth streams, overwhelming SRS's capacity to handle connections and process streams. This leads to resource exhaustion within SRS and prevents legitimate users from publishing or playing streams, causing a denial of service.
An attacker exploits vulnerabilities in the protocol handling logic within SRS for protocols like RTMP, WebRTC, or HLS. This could involve sending malformed protocol messages that trigger bugs in SRS's protocol implementation, leading to denial of service, information disclosure, or remote code execution on the SRS server.
Threat: SRS Software Vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities exist within the core SRS codebase itself due to coding errors or design flaws. Attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to directly compromise the SRS server. Exploits could lead to remote code execution, allowing complete control of the SRS server and potentially the underlying system.
Critical misconfigurations in SRS settings can create severe security weaknesses. Examples include exposing management interfaces without authentication, enabling highly insecure protocols, or misconfiguring access controls to allow public write access. Attackers exploiting these misconfigurations can gain full administrative control over SRS and potentially the server.
Attackers can craft requests or streams that specifically target resource-intensive SRS functionalities (e.g., transcoding, complex stream processing) to cause extreme resource consumption (CPU, memory) on the SRS server. This can lead to a complete server crash or prolonged service outage, effectively a denial of service.
Attackers generate a massive number of playback requests, specifically targeting the SRS server's playback handling capabilities. This overwhelms SRS's ability to serve streams, leading to resource exhaustion within SRS and preventing legitimate viewers from accessing streams, resulting in a denial of service. This is distinct from network-level DoS and focuses on overloading SRS itself.
Threat: HTTP API Vulnerabilities
Critical vulnerabilities in the SRS HTTP API, used for management and control, can be exploited. These could include remote code execution flaws, authentication bypass allowing administrative access, or critical authorization flaws. Successful exploitation grants attackers administrative control over the SRS server.
Threat: Configuration File Manipulation
Attackers gain unauthorized write access to SRS configuration files (e.g., srs.conf). By modifying these files, they can drastically alter SRS behavior, inject malicious configurations, disable security features, or gain control over stream routing and access, potentially leading to server compromise or service disruption.
Using default credentials for the SRS management interface provides immediate and trivial administrative access to attackers. This is a critical vulnerability as default credentials are widely known and easily exploited, granting full control over the SRS server.
Exposing the SRS management interface (e.g., HTTP API, web UI) directly to the public internet without any authentication or access control allows anyone to attempt to exploit it. This drastically increases the attack surface and makes it trivial for attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in the management interface, potentially leading to server compromise.