Loop boundary injections occur in an application when the application retrieves data from a user or a third-party service and inserts it into a
loop or a function acting as a loop, without sanitizing it first.
If an application contains a loop that is vulnerable to injections, it is exposed to attacks that target its availability where that loop is
used.
A user with malicious intent carefully performs actions whose goal is to cause the loop to run for more iterations than the developer intended,
resulting in unexpected behavior or even a crash of the program.
After creating the malicious request, the attacker can attack the servers affected by this vulnerability without relying on any prerequisites.
What is the potential impact?
After discovering the injection point, attackers insert data into the vulnerable field to either make the affected component inaccessible, attempt
a malfunction, or read from an artifact that exceeds the developer’s intended boundaries.
In languages that don’t enforce memory access checks, this can also lead to a buffer overflow or underflow which may result in sensitive
information disclosure or remote code execution.
Below are some real-world scenarios that illustrate some impacts of an attacker exploiting the vulnerability.
Self Denial of service
If the component affected by this vulnerability is not a bottleneck that acts as a single point of failure (SPOF) within the application, the
denial of service might only affect the attacker who initiated it.
Even if the denial of service has little direct impact, it can cause secondary effects in architectures that use containers and container
orchestrators. It could cause unexpected container failures or resource overconsumption, for example.
Infrastructure SPOFs
A denial of service attack can be critical to the enterprise if it targets a SPOF component. Sometimes the SPOF is a software architecture
vulnerability (such as a single component on which multiple critical components depend) or an operational vulnerability (for example, insufficient
container creation capabilities or failures from containers to terminate).
In either case, attackers aim to exploit the infrastructure weakness by sending as many malicious payloads as possible, using potentially huge
offensive infrastructures.
These threats are particularly insidious if the attacked organization does not maintain a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
