CAPEC-496 Metadata
Likelihood of Attack
Medium
Typical Severity
High
Overview
Summary
An attacker may execute a ICMP Fragmentation attack against a target with the intention of consuming resources or causing a crash. The attacker crafts a large number of identical fragmented IP packets containing a portion of a fragmented ICMP message. The attacker these sends these messages to a target host which causes the host to become non-responsive. Another vector may be sending a fragmented ICMP message to a target host with incorrect sizes in the header which causes the host to hang.
Prerequisites
This type of an attack requires the target system to be running a vulnerable implementation of IP, and the attacker needs to ability to send arbitrary sized ICMP packets to the target.
Potential Solutions / Mitigations
This attack may be mitigated through egress filtering based on ICMP payload so a network is a "good neighbor" to other networks. Bad IP implementations become patched, so using the proper version of a browser or OS is recommended.
Related Weaknesses (CWE)
Related CAPECs
| CAPEC ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CAPEC-130 | An adversary causes the target to allocate excessive resources to servicing the attackers' request, thereby reducing the resources available for legitimate services and degrading or denying services. Usually, this attack focuses on memory allocation, but any finite resource on the target could be the attacked, including bandwidth, processing cycles, or other resources. This attack does not attempt to force this allocation through a large number of requests (that would be Resource Depletion through Flooding) but instead uses one or a small number of requests that are carefully formatted to force the target to allocate excessive resources to service this request(s). Often this attack takes advantage of a bug in the target to cause the target to allocate resources vastly beyond what would be needed for a normal request. |
Stay Ahead of Attack Patterns
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