Software Engineering Institute

Updated:  March 04, 2016

Statement Date:   March 04, 2016

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

"Akamai is aware of the research paper titled "Forwarding-Loop Attacks in
Content Delivery Networks
<https://community.akamai.com/external-link.jspa?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.inter
netsociety.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fblogs-media%2Fforwarding-loop-att
acks-content-delivery-networks.pdf> " published by Jianjun Chen et. al on
Feb. 29.  We have reviewed the researchers' findings, and are confident that
we already have adequate counter-measures in place to thwart any attempt to
use Akamai as an attack vector in the manner described by the paper.

The paper describes four types of forwarding-loop attacks against CDNs:
self-loop, intra-CDN loop, inter-CDN loop and dam flooding. The paper
acknowledges that Akamai is not vulnerable to the first two. The third
attack (the "inter-CDN loop attack") is described as a looping between
multiple CDNs.  Finally, the fourth -- "dam flooding" -- is described as
coupling "forwarding-loop attacks with timely controlled HTTP responses to
significantly increase damage."

While Akamai does not publicly disclose or discuss our security
countermeasures, we would like to reiterate that we have sufficient
countermeasures in place to detect and defend against all these attacks, as
well as substantial capacity to absorb traffic spikes. If you have any
additional questions/concerns, please reach out to your Akamai
representative."

Vendor Information

We are not aware of further vendor information regarding this vulnerability.

Vendor References

• https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/03/akamai-response-to-forwarding-loop-issue.html
• https://community.akamai.com/community/security-research-and-intelligence/blog/2016/03/03/akamai-response-to-forwarding-loop-issue