Medusa: Unveil Memory Exhaustion DoS Vulnerabilities in Protocol Implementations

Web services have brought great convenience to our daily lives. Meanwhile, they are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. DoS attacks launched via vulnerabilities in the services can cause great harm. The vulnerabilities in protocol implementations are especially important because they are the keystones of web services. One vulnerable protocol implementation can affect all the web services built on top of it. Compared to the vulnerabilities that cause the target service to crash, resource exhaustion vulnerabilities are equally if not more important. This is because such vulnerabilities can deplete the system resources, leading to the unavailability of not only the vulnerable service but also other services running on the same machine. Despite the significance of this type of vulnerability, there has been limited research in this area.

In this paper, we propose Medusa, a dynamic analysis framework to detect memory exhaustion vulnerabilities in protocol implementations, which are the most common type of resource exhaustion vulnerabilities. Medusa works in two phases: exploration phase and verification. In the exploration phase, a protocol property graph (PPG) is constructed to embed the states with relevant properties including memory consumption information. In the verification phase, the PPG is used to simulate DoS attacks to verify the vulnerabilities. We implemented Medusa and evaluated its performance on 21 implementations of five protocols. The results demonstrate that Medusa outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques by discovering overall 127× maximum memory consumption. Lastly, Medusa has discovered six 0-day vulnerabilities in six protocol implementations for three protocols. Particularly, one of the vulnerabilities was found in Eclipse Mosquitto, which can affect thousands of services and it has been assigned with a CVE ID.