Researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany have disclosed the details of a new denial-of-service (DoS) attack vector that impacts several widely used UDP-based application protocols and hundreds of thousands of internet-facing systems.
The experts have demonstrated a
loop DoS attack where an attacker uses IP spoofing to get two servers to communicate with each other indefinitely over a protocol they both use.
“The newly discovered DoS loop attack is self-perpetuating and targets application-layer messages. It pairs two network services in such a way that they keep responding to one another’s messages indefinitely. In doing so, they create large volumes of traffic that result in a denial of service for involved systems or networks,” the researchers explained. “Once a trigger is injected and the loop set in motion, even the attackers are unable to stop the attack. Previously known loop attacks occurred on the routing layer of a single network and were limited to a finite number of loop iterations,” they added.
