attack-surface.md

Attack Surface Analysis for tsenart/vegeta

Attack Surface: Outbound Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

Description: An attacker leverages the application's vegeta integration to launch a DoS attack against an external target using vegeta's core functionality. This is the most significant risk, stemming directly from vegeta's purpose.

How Vegeta Contributes: Vegeta is the tool used to generate the HTTP requests that constitute the DoS attack. Its core functionality of sending requests at a specified rate and duration is directly exploited.

Example: An attacker manipulates a web form field that controls the vegeta target, changing it from test.internal.example.com to victim.example.com, and sets a high request rate, directly using vegeta to flood the target.

Impact: The target system (victim.example.com) becomes unavailable, disrupting services.

Risk Severity: Critical

Mitigation Strategies:

• Strict Input Validation (Whitelist): Never allow user input to directly control the target, rate, or duration parameters passed to vegeta. Use a whitelist of pre-approved targets.
• Rate Limiting (Application Level): Implement strict rate limits on the invocation of vegeta within the application.
• Authentication & Authorization: Only allow authenticated and authorized users to trigger vegeta functionality.
• Network Segmentation: Isolate the application using vegeta to prevent it from reaching external targets.
• Dedicated Testing Environment: Run vegeta only against a dedicated, isolated testing environment.

Attack Surface: Application-Level Resource Exhaustion

Description: An attacker manipulates vegeta parameters (rate, duration) to cause vegeta itself to consume excessive resources (CPU, memory, network) on the server hosting the application, leading to application unavailability.

How Vegeta Contributes: Vegeta's ability to generate high request loads, even against a local or loopback target, is the direct cause of the resource exhaustion. The attack leverages vegeta's core functionality.

Example: An attacker sets an extremely high request rate and duration within allowed vegeta parameters, causing the vegeta process itself (and thus the application) to consume all available CPU or memory.

Impact: The application becomes unresponsive.

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Resource Limits (cgroups/OS): Use OS-level resource limits (e.g., cgroups) to constrain the resources vegeta can consume.
• Configuration Limits (Vegeta): Set hard limits within the application's code that calls vegeta for maximum request rate, duration, and concurrent connections, regardless of user input. These limits should be enforced before calling vegeta.
• Monitoring: Monitor the host system's resource usage.

Attack Surface: Abuse of Custom Reporters

Description: If custom reporters are used and their configuration is controlled by an attacker, the attacker could use vegeta's reporter mechanism to execute malicious actions.

How Vegeta Contributes: Vegeta's feature of allowing custom reporters is the direct enabler of this attack. The attacker exploits the extensibility point provided by vegeta.

Example: An attacker provides a malicious configuration for a custom vegeta reporter that, when invoked by vegeta, writes to a system file or executes a shell command.

Impact: Varies, but could include data leakage or arbitrary code execution, depending on the exploited reporter.

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Validate Reporter Configuration: Strictly validate and sanitize any configuration options passed to vegeta for custom reporters.
• Restrict Reporter Capabilities: Run vegeta (and thus its reporters) in a restricted environment (e.g., a container) to limit potential damage.
• Avoid User-Supplied Reporters: Do not allow users to specify or configure custom reporters for vegeta. Use only pre-approved, vetted reporters.