Title

The API must employ throttling. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

The API must employ throttling to limit the effects of information flooding types of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. DoS is a condition when a resource is not available for legitimate users. When this occurs, the organization either cannot accomplish its mission or must operate at degraded capacity. In the case of application DoS attacks, care must be taken when designing the application to ensure the application makes the best use of system resources. SQL queries have the potential to consume large amounts of CPU cycles if they are not tuned for optimal performance. Web services containing complex calculations requiring large amounts of time to complete can bog down if too many requests for the service are encountered within a short period of time. The methods employed to meet this requirement will vary depending upon the technology the application uses. However, a variety of technologies exist to limit or, in some cases, eliminate the effects of application-related DoS attacks. Employing increased capacity and bandwidth combined with specialized application layer protection devices and service redundancy may reduce the susceptibility to some DoS attacks.

Check Content

Review the API architecture documentation and identify solutions that provide API DoS protections. Verify the API employs throttling to limit the effects of information flooding attacks. This includes: - Requests per second. - Sliding window algorithm. - Request queues. - Reduce parallelism and call frequency. If the API does not employ throttling to limit the effects of information flooding attacks, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Build or configure the API to employ throttling to limit the effects of information flooding attacks.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-274612r1143931_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-274612

Group Title: SRG-APP-000247

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.