CWE-1088: Synchronous Access of Remote Resource without Timeout
Learn about CWE-1088 (Synchronous Access of Remote Resource without Timeout), its security impact, exploitation methods, and prevention guidelines.
What is Synchronous Access of Remote Resource without Timeout?
• Overview: This vulnerability occurs when code makes a synchronous call to a remote resource without setting a timeout. If the remote service is unresponsive, the application can hang indefinitely, potentially leading to service outages or degraded performance.
• Exploitation Methods:
- Attackers can exploit this by causing the remote resource to become unresponsive, leading to denial-of-service conditions.
- Common attack patterns include sending malformed requests to the remote service or overwhelming the service with traffic to induce unresponsiveness.
• Security Impact:
- Direct consequences include the application becoming unresponsive or crashing.
- Potential cascading effects include failure of dependent services or processes within the application.
- Business impact may involve loss of availability, customer dissatisfaction, and potential revenue loss due to downtime.
• Prevention Guidelines:
- Implement timeouts for all synchronous remote resource calls to ensure the application can recover from unresponsive services.
- Follow security best practices by employing exception handling to manage and log timeout events gracefully.
- Use recommended tools and frameworks that support setting timeouts and retry mechanisms, such as HTTP clients or asynchronous programming libraries that inherently handle these concerns.
Technical Details
Likelihood of Exploit: Not specified
Affected Languages: Not specified
Affected Technologies: Not specified