Apache range request denial of service

A rather potent denial of service (DoS) vulnerability in the Apache HTTP server has dominated the security news over the last week. It was first reported by way of a proof-of-concept posted to the full-disclosure mailing list on August 20. The problem itself is due to a bug in the way that Apache implemented HTTP Range headers, but there is also an underlying problem in the way those HTTP headers are defined.

The proof-of-concept (posted by "Kingcope") is a fairly simple Perl script that makes multiple connections to a web host, each with a long and, arguably, incorrectly redundant Range specified in the headers. Only a small number of these connections can cause enormous memory and CPU usage on the web host. This is a classic "amplification" attack, where a small amount of resources on the attacker side can lead to consuming many more victim-side resources. In some sense, normal HTTP requests are amplifications, because a few bytes of request can lead to a multi-megabyte response (a large PDF for example), but this attack is different. A single request can lead to multiple partial responses, each with their own header and, importantly, server overhead. It is the resources required to create the responses that leads to the DoS.

The Range header is meant to be used to request just a portion of the resource, but, as we see here, it can be abused. The idea is that a streaming client or other application can request chunks of the resource as it plays or displays them. An HTTP request with the following:

    Range: bytes=512-1023

would be asking for 512 bytes starting at the 513th (it is zero-based). But it is not just a single range that can be specified:

    Range: bytes=512-1023,1024-2047

would request two ranges, each of which would be sent in either a separate response (each with a Content-Range header) or in a multipart response (i.e. with a multipart/byteranges Content-Type).

Each of those examples is fairly benign. The problem stems from requests that look like:

    Range: bytes=0-,5-0,5-1,...,5-6,5-7,5-8,5-9,5-10,...

which requests the whole file (0-) along with several nonsensical ranges (5-0,5-1,...) as well as a bunch of overlapping ranges. The example is taken from the proof-of-concept code (which creates 1300 ranges for each request), and other kinds of lengthy range requests will also cause the DoS.

When it receives range requests, Apache dutifully creates pieces of a multipart response for each range specified. That eats up both memory and CPU on the server, and doing so tens or hundreds of times for multiple attacker connections is enough to exhaust the server resources and cause the DoS. The range requests in the attack are obviously not reasonable, but they are legal according to the HTTP specification. There is discussion of changing the specification, but that doesn't help right now.

An obvious solution would be to sort the ranges (as they don't have to be in any specific order) and coalesce those that are adjacent or overlap. If the range turned out to correspond to the entire file, the server could just send that instead. Unfortunately, (arguably) badly written applications or browsers may be expecting to get multipart responses in the same order, and with the same lengths, as specified in the request. In addition, the HTTP specification does not allow that kind of reordering.

So the Apache solution is to look at the sum of the lengths of the ranges in a request and if that's greater than the size of the requested file, just send the whole file. That will defeat the proof-of-concept and drastically reduce the amplification factor that any particular request can cause. It doesn't completely solve the problem, but it alleviates the worst part. Attackers can still craft nonsensical range requests, but the number of responses they can generate is vastly reduced.

While Apache's implementation of range requests is fairly resource-hungry, which makes it easier to cause the DoS, the HTTP protocol bears some of the blame here too. Allowing multiple overlapping ranges does not really make any sense, and not allowing servers to reorder and coalesce adjacent ranges seems poorly thought-out as well. No matter how efficiently implemented, allowing arbitrary ranges of that sort is going to lead to some sort of amplification effect.

Apache's fix is for the stable 2.2 series, so it is necessarily fairly conservative. There are ongoing discussions going on in the Apache dev mailing list that indicate a more robust fix—probably following the proposed changes to the HTTP specification—is in the works for the 2.3 development branch (which will eventually become the stable 2.4 release).

As of this writing, only Debian has released a fix for the problem (which it did based on the patch while it was being tested and before Apache announced its fix). Other distributions are sure to follow. Since it is trivially easy to make an unpatched server unresponsive, it probably makes sense to use one of the mitigation techniques suggested by Apache until a server update is available.

[ A word of warning to those who may be tempted to try the proof-of-concept code: while limiting the number-of-forks command-line parameter to 1 may seem like a good idea for testing purposes, it doesn't actually work in practice. If that parameter is <= 1, the code sets it to 50, which is enough to DoS a server—trust me on that last part. ]

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