CAPEC-489
SSL Flood
An adversary may execute a flooding attack using the SSL protocol with the intent to deny legitimate users access to a service by consuming all the available resources on the server side. These attacks take advantage of the asymmetric relationship between the processing power used by the client and the processing power used by the server to create a secure connection. In this manner the attacker can make a large number of HTTPS requests on a low provisioned machine to tie up a disproportionately large number of resources on the server. The clients then continue to keep renegotiating the SSL connection. When multiplied by a large number of attacking machines, this attack can result in a crash or loss of service to legitimate users.
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Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-489: SSL Flood: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/489.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/489?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.
Prerequisites
This type of an attack requires the ability to generate a large amount of SSL traffic to send a target server.
Mitigations
To mitigate this type of an attack, an organization can create rule based filters to silently drop connections if too many are attempted in a certain time period.
Weaknesses it exploits
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Recent CVEs with these weaknesses
- –CVE-2026-86531
The embedded OpenEJB HTTP server does not limit the size of incoming request bodies or of multipart requests, and does not remove the temporary files it creates for multipart parts. A remote unauthenticated attacker can cause excessive mem…
- 7.0CVE-2026-114359
Eclipse Kura downloads deployment packages (DPs) from a remote URL without any limit on the size of the data it receives. A malicious or compromised HTTP(S) server, or an attacker able to tamper with a plain-HTTP download, can stream an ar…
- 8.7CVE-2026-60040
An unauthenticated remote attacker can perform a DoS in the backends backup creation function. This can result in a total loss of availability.
- 8.7CVE-2026-123817
AIOHTTP is an asynchronous HTTP client/server framework for asyncio and Python. Prior to 3.14.4, the WebSocket reader retains one bytes object for each transport read while reassembling an incomplete frame. A malicious peer can split a fra…
- 6.8CVE-2026-125205
FFmpeg through 9.0.2 contains an unbounded memory allocation vulnerability in the av1_frame_merge bitstream filter that allows attackers to exhaust memory by never sending a temporal delimiter OBU. Attackers can supply a crafted .obu file …
- 5.7CVE-2026-125186
FFmpeg through 9.0.2 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in the dts2pts bitstream filter that allows attackers to exhaust CPU through unbounded per-packet POC node allocation. Attackers can supply a crafted H.264 pa…
- 6.8CVE-2026-125180
FFmpeg 8.1 through 9.0.2 contains a memory exhaustion vulnerability in the libavcodec/exif.c parser that allows attackers to amplify allocations by pointing many IFD entries at overlapping payloads. Attackers can embed a small crafted EXIF…
- 7.5CVE-2026-112322
clean_client() in lib/rpc/svc_auth_gssapi.c in MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) restarts its scan from the head of the client list after each removal, resulting in quadratic CPU cost. Remote attackers can cause a denial of service (CPU consumptio…
The newest records naming one of them. Each weakness's page lists them all.
Related attack patterns
- Part of
- CAPEC-125 Flooding
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