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Service Denied! Understanding How Regex DoS Attacks Work

Service Denied! Understanding How Regex DoS Attacks Work

Did you know that people can knock your Rails application offline just by submitting specially formatted strings in a form or API request? In this talk, we’ll take a look at what’s really going on with a regex denial of service (DoS) attack. We’ll take a peek into the CRuby regex engine to see what it’s really doing when we ask it to match against a string. With a basic understanding of how regular expressions work, we can better understand what these attacks do, why they tie up so much CPU, and what we can do to guard against them.

Kevin Menard

June 15, 2022
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  1. I work at Shopify. It’s a fun place to be

    and I get to do interesting work. We’re hiring. Please feel free to reach out if you’re interested.
  2. • High performance implementation of Ruby • Focuses on peak

    performance • Designed to optimize idiomatic Ruby • Intended to be compatible with CRuby • Even runs native extensions
  3. • Sample benchmarks from yjit-bench • https://github.com/Shopify/yjit-bench • Left: activerecord

    benchmark • Right: erubi benchmark Benchmark data from https://eregon.me/blog/2022/01/06/benchmarking-cruby-mjit-yjit-jruby-tru ff leruby.html
  4. 1. Context for topic 2. Intro to Denial of Service

    3. De f ine ReDoS 4. Crash course in performance analysis (Real world “Big-O” notation!) 5. Dive into regular expressions (Learn about state machines!) 6. Bring it on home Breakdown
  5. I was working on improving regex performance in Tru ff

    leRuby for a chunk of 2021 to improve performance of browser_sni ff er gem Tru ff leRuby picked up a second regex engine earlier in the year to JIT common expressions; old engine retained for fallback To ensure compatibility, I spent a lot of time looking into CRuby’s regex engine (Onigmo) A Fortunate Series of Events
  6. • Attacker is simply trying to mess with you •

    For Rails: “service” usually means a web request • DoS prevents you from achieving performance and availability objectives • Attacker wastes ( f inite) compute resources on junk requests • Either by specially crafted input or by volume • Can sometimes be di ff icult to distinguish malice from corner cases • You can get surprisingly far with “N + 1” queries on small inputs Denial of Service
  7. - Open Web Application Security Project® (OWASP) (https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Regular_expression_Denial_of_Service_-_ReDoS) The Regular

    expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a Denial of Service attack, that exploits the fact that most Regular Expression implementations may reach extreme situations that cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size).
  8. - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS A regular expression denial of service (ReDoS)

    is an algorithmic complexity attack that produces a denial-of-service by providing a regular expression and/or an input that takes a long time to evaluate.
  9. - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS The attack exploits the fact that many

    regular expression implementations have super-linear worst-case complexity; on certain regex-input pairs, the time taken can grow polynomially or exponentially in relation to the input size.
  10. • Results are easy to understand • Considerations: • Require

    code AND inputs to reproduce • Very much tied to benchmark environment • Quite tricky to normalize or eliminate system e ff ects Benchmark data from https://eregon.me/blog/2022/01/06/benchmarking-cruby-mjit-yjit-jruby-tru ff leruby.html
  11. • Idea: Count key operations to measure and compare, doable

    by hand • Example: You have 10 doors and 10 keys • How many times would you have to turn a key before you found each pair? • Now, how about 20 doors and 20 keys? • Input Data: Those operations are always relative to some sort of input: • Array size for array sorting • Match string length of regex • Context: Best case? Worst case? Average case? Something else? • Usually, we’re talking about worst case Algorithmic Complexity
  12. Asymptotic Complexity Notation Descriptive Name O(1) Constant Time O(log2(n)) Logarithmic

    Time O(n) Linear Time O(n⋅lg(n)) Linearithmic Time O(n2) Quadratic Time O(n3) Cubic Time O(2n) Exponential Time }Polynomial Time
  13. Adapted from Russ Cox’s Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple

    and Fast… https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html (2007) max_count = ARGV.empty? ? ENV['MAX_COUNT'] : ARGV.first.to_i def run_iteration(count) # /a?ⁿaⁿ/ definition from https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html r = Regexp.compile("a?" * count + "a" * count) t1 = Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC) r.match?("a" * count) t2 = Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC) t2 - t1 end puts "Count,Time (s)" (1..max_count).each do |count| time = run_iteration(count) puts "#{count},#{time}" $stdout.flush end
  14. Adapted from Russ Cox’s Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple

    and Fast… https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html (2007) # /a?ⁿaⁿ/ defn from https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html # E.g., n = 3 #=> /a?a?a?aaa/ r = Regexp.compile("a?" * count + "a" * count) # Pathological case: # E.g., n = 3 #=> "aaa" r.match?("a" * count)
  15. • A compact DSL for: • Writing programs to pattern

    match strings • Instructions for building a state machine • Describing a regular language • Sort of: Ruby adds extensions that aren’t regular What are regular expressions?
  16. • Abstraction for recording the state an object is and

    how it transitions to other states • States represented by circles, called nodes • Transitions represented by directional arrows • Sometimes transitions have labels to make their selection conditional State Machines
  17. • Two types: NFA and DFA • NFA: Nondeterministic Finite

    Automata • States can have overlapping transitions • What’s nondeterministic is which one is chosen • DFA: Deterministic Finite Automata • For each (state, input_character) pair, there is only one possible transition Regex State Machines
  18. - Gordon Gekko (Wall Street) Greed — for lack of

    a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works.
  19. DFA for /a?a?a?a?aaaa/ “aa” : Start ➡ S1 ➡ S2

    ➡ 🛑 “abc”: Start ➡ S1 ➡ Start ➡ Start ➡ 🛑 “defg”: Start ➡ Start ➡ Start ➡ Start ➡ 🛑
  20. • Form submission • Can’t rely on front-end validation or

    restrictions (e.g., max form f ield length) • Attacker can just POST the data directly to your server • Attacker could adjust element attributes in web developer tools • API calls made by users • Sourcing data from other locations We Handle Untrusted 3rd Party Data
  21. • Never build a Regexp object from a user-supplied data

    • Process text data before feeding it to a regex • E.g., truncate it if excessively long • Ruby does this for Date parsing methods as of 3.0.3 • Don’t rely on front-end validation or restrictions! • Upgrade Rails and Ruby when security releases are cut • Ruby 3.2 introduces Regexp time limits, both global and per-Regexp What Can we do About It?
  22. • Try to adjust your regex to something equivalent, but

    with limited backtracking: • Don’t nest quanti f iers (e.g, avoid something like /a(.+)*b/) • Specify upper-bounds on quanti f iers if you can • E.g., \w{1,5} instead of \w+ • Use atomic grouping: ?> • Try to think through your pathological cases and test them • Remember to test progressively longer match strings • Make sure your input strings exercise the backtracking behavior Think Like an Attacker
  23. • How to talk about performance without benchmarking • How

    a regex engine compiles a pattern into a state machine • How two classes of state machines operate: NFA vs DFA • How attackers trigger a ReDoS and how to guard against them What We’ve Learned
  24. • regex101.com: Debugger to see how your regex works •

    regexper.com: Build a visual representation of regex state machine • Test your regex with growing number of ReDoS detection tools: • regexploit: https://github.com/doyensec/regexploit • ReDoS checker: https://devina.io/redos-checker • Try regexp_parser gem dissect regex and match on components • Helpful for writing tests • https://github.com/ammar/regexp_parser Helpful Resources
  25. • regular_expression: https://github.com/kddnewton/regular_expression • A regex engine written in Ruby

    (Shopify Hack Days project) • Russ Cox’s regex articles: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ • TRegex: https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/regex • “Just-in-Time Compiling Ruby Regexps on Tru ff leRuby” RubyConf 2021 talk Educational Resources
  26. • Ruby logo: © 2006, Yukihiro Matsumoto. • Licensed under

    CC BY - SA 2.5: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ • Tru ff leRuby logo: © 2017 Talkdesk, Inc. • Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ • Rails logo is in the public domain • CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication • YJIT logo: © 2021, Shopify, Inc. • Tapioca logo: © Shopify, Inc. • Sorbet logo: © Stripe • “2021” picture: © 2021, Matthew Henry https://burst.shopify.com/photos/the- year-2021-in-black-ink Image Licenses