Attack Surface Analysis for fuellabs/fuel-core

Attack Surface: P2P Network Denial of Service (DoS) - Connection Flooding

Description: Attackers flood the fuel-core node with connection requests, overwhelming its resources and preventing legitimate peers from connecting.
Fuel-Core Contribution: fuel-core implements a P2P networking layer to participate in the Fuel network. This layer is inherently exposed to network-based DoS attacks due to its need to accept connections from peers.
Example: A botnet sends thousands of connection requests per second to a fuel-core node. The node becomes unresponsive, unable to process legitimate transactions or synchronize with the network.
Impact: Node unavailability, disruption of service, inability to participate in the Fuel network, potential financial losses if the node is critical for application functionality.
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
- Connection Rate Limiting: Configure fuel-core to limit the rate of incoming connection requests from individual IP addresses or peers (if configurable).
- Connection Limits: Set maximum connection limits within fuel-core configuration to prevent resource exhaustion.
- Firewall Configuration: Deploy firewalls to filter and block suspicious traffic based on IP address, port, or connection patterns before it reaches fuel-core.
- Resource Monitoring: Implement system-level monitoring to detect unusual connection patterns and trigger alerts, allowing for reactive mitigation.
- Peer Reputation/Blacklisting (if available in Fuel-Core): Utilize any peer reputation or blacklisting features provided by fuel-core to automatically manage peer connections.

Attack Surface: API GraphQL Injection

Description: Attackers craft malicious GraphQL queries to exploit vulnerabilities in the GraphQL API exposed by fuel-core.
Fuel-Core Contribution: fuel-core exposes a GraphQL API for interacting with the node and retrieving blockchain data. Vulnerabilities in the implementation of this API within fuel-core can lead to injection attacks.
Example: An attacker crafts a GraphQL query that bypasses intended data access controls to retrieve sensitive information about other users or internal node state. Or, a computationally expensive query is sent to overload the node's API processing.
Impact: Data breaches, unauthorized access to sensitive information managed by the node, denial of service of the API, potential compromise of node integrity depending on the severity of the injection vulnerability.
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
- Input Validation and Sanitization (Fuel-Core Developers): Fuel-core developers must implement strict input validation and sanitization for all GraphQL query parameters and variables within the fuel-core codebase itself.
- Least Privilege Principle (Fuel-Core Developers): Fuel-core GraphQL schema and resolvers should be designed to adhere to the principle of least privilege, only exposing necessary data and operations.
- Query Complexity Limits (Fuel-Core Configuration/Developers): Configure or implement query complexity limits within fuel-core to prevent resource exhaustion and DoS via complex queries.
- Authentication and Authorization (Application Developers & Fuel-Core Configuration): Application developers using the API should implement authentication and authorization layers on top of the Fuel-core API if sensitive operations are exposed. Fuel-core itself might offer some basic API access controls that should be configured.
- Regular Security Audits (Fuel-Core Developers & Application Developers): Conduct regular security audits of the GraphQL API schema, resolvers, and usage patterns in applications.

Attack Surface: Implementation Bugs in Fuel-Core Codebase

Description: General software vulnerabilities (e.g., buffer overflows, memory leaks, logic errors, remote code execution) present in the fuel-core codebase itself.
Fuel-Core Contribution: As with any complex software, fuel-core's codebase may contain implementation bugs that are inherent to the software development process. These bugs are directly within fuel-core.
Example: A buffer overflow vulnerability in the P2P message handling code of fuel-core. An attacker sends a specially crafted message that triggers the overflow, potentially leading to remote code execution on the node.
Impact: Node crashes, denial of service, data corruption, potential remote code execution, full system compromise, and potential network-wide impact if the vulnerability is widespread and exploitable across many Fuel nodes.
Risk Severity: Critical
Mitigation Strategies:
- Secure Coding Practices (Fuel-Core Developers): Fuel Labs developers must rigorously adhere to secure coding practices during fuel-core development.
- Code Reviews (Fuel-Core Developers): Thorough and frequent code reviews by multiple experienced developers are crucial to identify potential bugs and vulnerabilities before release.
- Static and Dynamic Analysis (Fuel-Core Developers): Fuel Labs should utilize static and dynamic analysis tools as part of their development process to automatically detect potential vulnerabilities.
- Fuzzing (Fuel-Core Developers): Extensive fuzzing of fuel-core's components, especially network-facing parts and parsers, is essential to uncover robustness issues.
- Bug Bounty Programs (Fuel-Core Developers): Maintaining a robust bug bounty program incentivizes external security researchers to find and responsibly report vulnerabilities.
- Regular Security Audits (Fuel-Core Developers): Independent security audits by reputable security firms should be conducted regularly to provide an external perspective on code security.
- Prompt Security Patching (Fuel-Core Developers & Users): Fuel Labs must have a process for quickly releasing and communicating security patches. Users must promptly apply these patches to their fuel-core instances.
- Stay Updated with Security Advisories (Users): Users should actively monitor Fuel Labs security advisories and communication channels for vulnerability announcements and updates.