CAPEC-25 Forced Deadlock

The adversary triggers and exploits a deadlock condition in the target software to cause a denial of service. A deadlock can occur when two or more competing actions are waiting for each other to finish, and thus neither ever does. Deadlock conditions can be difficult to detect.

1. [Explore] The adversary initiates an exploratory phase to get familiar with the system. 2. [Explore] The adversary triggers a first action (such as holding a resource) and initiates a second action which will wait for the first one to finish. 3. [Explore] If the target program has a deadlock condition, the program waits indefinitely resulting in a denial of service.

• The target host has a deadlock condition. There are four conditions for a deadlock to occur, known as the Coffman conditions. [REF-101] • The target host exposes an API to the user.

• [Medium] This type of attack may be sophisticated and require knowledge about the system's resources and APIs.

• Availability: Resource Consumption

• Use known algorithm to avoid deadlock condition (for instance non-blocking synchronization algorithms). • For competing actions, use well-known libraries which implement synchronization.