threat-modeling.md

Threat Model Analysis for gocolly/colly

Threat: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (DoS/DDoS)

• 1. Threat: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (DoS/DDoS)

  • Description: An attacker, or a poorly configured legitimate user, configures colly to send excessive requests, ignoring robots.txt, disabling rate limiting, or setting a high Parallelism. This overwhelms the target, causing a denial of service.
  • Impact: High. Target website unavailability, legal repercussions, IP blocking, reputational damage.
  • Affected colly Component:
    • colly.Collector: Core component managing requests and concurrency.
    • LimitRule: Misconfiguration or absence of Delay, RandomDelay, and Parallelism.
    • colly.Async: Uncontrolled use of goroutines.
    • colly.RobotsTxt: Disabling or ignoring RobotsTxt support.
  • Risk Severity: High
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Mandatory Rate Limiting: Enforce strict LimitRule configurations.
    • robots.txt Compliance: Always enable and respect robots.txt using c.SetRobotsTxtHandler.
    • Async Control: Carefully limit concurrent goroutines when using Async.
    • Circuit Breaker: Stop scraping on consistent error codes (e.g., 5xx).
    • Exponential Backoff: Retry with exponential backoff for temporary errors.

Threat: Anti-Scraping Bypass (Intentional)

• 2. Threat: Anti-Scraping Bypass (Intentional)

  • Description: An attacker intentionally circumvents website anti-scraping measures. They might rapidly rotate user agents, use many proxies, attempt to solve CAPTCHAs automatically, or avoid honeypots.
  • Impact: High. Legal action, IP blocking, account suspension, data loss.
  • Affected colly Component:
    • colly.Collector: Core component.
    • colly.UserAgent: Setting/rotating user agents.
    • colly.ProxyFunc: Configuring proxy usage.
    • colly.Request: Manipulating request headers.
  • Risk Severity: High
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Ethical Scraping Policy: Do not bypass anti-scraping unless explicitly permitted.
    • Responsible User-Agent Rotation: Use a realistic, limited set of user agents if rotation is necessary and permitted.
    • Ethical Proxy Use: Use proxies responsibly and with permission, if permitted.
    • CAPTCHA Avoidance: Do not attempt automatic CAPTCHA solving unless permitted.
    • Honeypot Awareness: Design the scraper to avoid honeypots.

Threat: Unauthorized Data Access

• 3. Threat: Unauthorized Data Access

  • Description: The scraper accesses protected pages/data without proper authentication, or with compromised credentials. This could be due to hardcoded credentials, insecure storage, or a failure to implement authentication.
  • Impact: High. Data breach, legal consequences, reputational damage.
  • Affected colly Component:
    • colly.Collector: Core component.
    • colly.Request: Setting headers (including authentication).
    • colly.Post: Sending data for login forms.
  • Risk Severity: Critical
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Secure Credential Management: Never hardcode credentials. Use secure storage (environment variables, secrets management).
    • Proper Authentication: Implement robust authentication before using colly.
    • Least Privilege: The scraper should only access necessary data.
    • Session Management: Handle cookies and sessions securely.

Threat: Dependency Vulnerability Exploitation

• 4. Threat: Dependency Vulnerability Exploitation

  • Description: An attacker exploits a vulnerability in colly or its dependencies (e.g., net/http, goquery), potentially leading to arbitrary code execution.
  • Impact: Potentially High. Could lead to complete system compromise, data breaches.
  • Affected colly Component: Any component, depending on the vulnerability.
  • Risk Severity: High
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Regular Updates: Keep colly and dependencies updated.
    • Vulnerability Scanning: Use dependency vulnerability scanning tools.
    • Security Audits: Periodically review code and dependencies.