threat-modeling.md

Threat Model Analysis for fasterxml/jackson-core

Threat: Large JSON Payload DoS

• Description: An attacker sends an extremely large JSON payload to the application. Jackson Core attempts to parse this payload, consuming excessive CPU and memory resources on the server. This can lead to application slowdown, unresponsiveness, or complete service disruption. An attacker might automate sending numerous large payloads to amplify the impact.
  • Impact: Denial of Service, application unavailability, performance degradation, potential server crash, significant disruption to service availability.
  • Affected Jackson-core component: JsonFactory, JsonParser (core parsing functionality).
  • Risk Severity: High (when application is publicly accessible and lacks input size limits, making exploitation easy and impact significant).
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Implement strict input size limits for incoming JSON requests at the application level (e.g., web server, API gateway). This is the most critical mitigation.
    • Configure Jackson's JsonFactory to limit maximum input size if such options are available (check documentation for configurable limits, though jackson-core itself might have limited options, higher-level modules might offer more control).
    • Utilize streaming parsing with JsonParser when dealing with potentially large JSON documents to process them incrementally, minimizing memory footprint.
    • Implement robust resource monitoring and alerting to proactively detect and respond to unusual resource consumption patterns indicative of a DoS attack.
    • Consider using rate limiting or request throttling to limit the number of requests from a single source within a given timeframe, making it harder for attackers to overwhelm the system with large payloads.