Replay attacks in Wcf (now really)

@YaronNaveh

A few months ago I have written a post about replay attacks in Wcf. One of my readers had sent me a mail mentioning that while that post had some interesting information on replay attacks in general, it did not really discussed the Wcf part. In particular he asked me about the Wcf nonce cache and its difference from the Wse one. Also he was interested in cases where a replay attack may become a DOS attack. Here is what I wrote him back:

Yes, Wcf has a replay cache. One difference from the Wse cache is that in Wcf only the primary signature value is used for cache and not a username nonce (Wcf does not emit these anyway). You might want to take a look at some of the relevant Wcf security settings, for example ReplayCacheSize.

If you are really interested you can open reflector in System.ServiceModel.Security.ReceiveSecurityHeader.ProcessPrimarySignature() and see how the primary signature is validated againt the nonce cache:

...
this.primarySignatureValue = signedXml.GetSignatureValue();
    if (this.nonceCache != null)
    {
        CheckNonce(this.nonceCache, this.primarySignatureValue);
    }

...

As for DOS, the cache comes to solve the problem of replay attackes, e.g. an attacker sends a message a second time which makes a transaction presumably run twice and cause business damage. DOS attacks overloads the server with many requests until it stops from effectively surveying clients. While these attacks are not related, the cache used to prevent replay attacks can become very big until the server is out of memory. This can happen with or without a DOS taking place. For this reason the cache is limited in size and after X minutes a timestamp is used instead. If an attacker can send many non-replay requests in a short time to fill the cache he might be able to actually replay a message before the time windows is closed. However this will not be considered a DOS (even if it is just semantics). Regardless, I am not aware of any way for a web site to protect against a massive DOS attack where bots from around the globe act together.

@YaronNaveh

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