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attack-surface.md

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Attack Surface Analysis for microsoft/garnet

Attack Surface: Network Eavesdropping & Data Interception

  • Description: Unauthorized capture and potential modification of data transmitted between Garnet clients and servers, or between Garnet nodes.
    • Garnet's Contribution: Garnet relies on network communication for its core functionality. Without proper encryption, this communication is vulnerable.
    • Example: An attacker on the same network segment as a Garnet client uses a packet sniffer to capture unencrypted RESP commands and responses, revealing sensitive data stored in the cache.
    • Impact: Data breach, data modification, loss of confidentiality, potential for command injection if the attacker can modify requests.
    • Risk Severity: High (Critical if sensitive data is involved)
    • Mitigation Strategies:
      • Enforce Strong TLS: Use TLS 1.3 (preferred) or TLS 1.2 (minimum) with strong cipher suites.
      • Certificate Validation: Rigorously validate server certificates (and client certificates in mTLS).
      • Mutual TLS (mTLS): Consider mTLS for inter-node communication to ensure both client and server are authenticated.
      • Network Segmentation: Isolate Garnet servers and clients on a dedicated network segment to limit exposure.
      • Regular Audits: Regularly audit TLS configurations and certificate management practices.

Attack Surface: Denial-of-Service (DoS) via Network Flooding

  • Description: Overwhelming the Garnet server with network traffic, preventing legitimate clients from accessing the service.
    • Garnet's Contribution: Garnet's network-facing nature makes it a target for DoS attacks. Its performance is directly tied to network capacity.
    • Example: An attacker sends a flood of SYN packets to the Garnet server's port, exhausting its connection pool and preventing legitimate clients from connecting.
    • Impact: Service unavailability, disruption of dependent applications, potential financial losses.
    • Risk Severity: High
    • Mitigation Strategies:
      • Rate Limiting: Implement rate limiting on incoming connections and requests per client IP address or other identifiers.
      • Network Firewalls: Use firewalls to block malicious traffic and restrict access to Garnet's ports.
      • Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS): Deploy IDS/IPS to detect and block DoS attacks.
      • Load Balancing: Distribute traffic across multiple Garnet instances using a load balancer.
      • Connection Timeouts: Configure appropriate timeouts to prevent connections from lingering indefinitely.

Attack Surface: Memory Exhaustion (Resource Exhaustion DoS)

  • Description: Causing Garnet to consume all available memory, leading to a crash and denial of service.
    • Garnet's Contribution: Garnet is an in-memory data store. Its performance and availability are directly tied to available memory.
    • Example: An attacker sends a large number of SET commands with very large values, causing Garnet to allocate excessive memory and eventually crash.
    • Impact: Service unavailability, data loss (if persistence is not configured or fails), disruption of dependent applications.
    • Risk Severity: High
    • Mitigation Strategies:
      • Memory Limits: Configure maximum memory limits for the Garnet server process.
      • Eviction Policies: Implement eviction policies (LRU, LFU, etc.) to automatically remove data when memory is scarce.
      • Input Validation: Validate the size of keys and values to prevent excessively large data from being stored.
      • Monitoring: Monitor memory usage and set alerts for high memory consumption.

Attack Surface: Unauthorized Cluster Node Joining

  • Description: An attacker adding a malicious node to the Garnet cluster.
    • Garnet's Contribution: Garnet supports clustering for scalability and high availability. The cluster membership mechanism is a potential attack vector.
    • Example: An attacker, without proper credentials, uses Garnet's cluster management commands to add a rogue node that then steals or corrupts data.
    • Impact: Data breach, data corruption, cluster instability, potential for further attacks from the compromised node.
    • Risk Severity: High
    • Mitigation Strategies:
      • Strong Authentication: Require strong authentication (e.g., passwords, API keys, certificates) for nodes to join the cluster.
      • Mutual TLS (mTLS): Use mTLS for inter-node communication to ensure only authorized nodes can communicate.
      • Access Control Lists (ACLs): Implement ACLs to restrict which nodes can join the cluster.
      • Auditing: Regularly audit the cluster membership and logs for suspicious activity.

Attack Surface: Exploitation of Deserialization Vulnerabilities

  • Description: Injecting malicious code through the deserialization of custom objects stored in Garnet.
    • Garnet's Contribution: If Garnet is configured to store and retrieve custom objects (not just primitive data types), the deserialization process becomes a potential attack vector.
    • Example: An attacker stores a specially crafted object that, when deserialized by Garnet, executes arbitrary code on the server.
    • Impact: Remote code execution (RCE), complete server compromise, data breach, data corruption.
    • Risk Severity: Critical
    • Mitigation Strategies:
      • Avoid Custom Objects: If possible, avoid storing custom objects in Garnet. Use primitive data types or well-defined data formats (JSON, Protocol Buffers) with secure parsing libraries.
      • Secure Deserialization Libraries: If custom objects are necessary, use a secure serialization/deserialization library that is specifically designed to prevent deserialization vulnerabilities.
      • Type Whitelisting: Implement strict type whitelisting, allowing only specific, known-safe classes to be deserialized.
      • Sandboxing: Consider deserializing objects in a sandboxed environment to limit the impact of any potential exploits.