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strix/skills/vulnerabilities/denial_of_service.md

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+# Application-Level Denial of Service
+
+Find small attacker-controlled inputs that cause disproportionate computation, allocation, blocking, fan-out, retained state, cost, or shared-feature failure. Discovery is recall-first; promotion to a finding is proof-first. This is not a volumetric DDoS playbook.
+
+## Safety and Authorization Gate
+
+- Default to source review, unit tests, benchmarks, and disposable local environments. Never perform packet floods, distributed traffic, reflection/amplification, spoofing, multi-origin rate-limit evasion, or bandwidth saturation.
+- General target authorization is not DoS authorization. Shared-service tests require explicit approval for the exact target and test class, with hard request, concurrency, input-size, duration, error-rate, latency, and resource ceilings.
+- Identify monitoring, abort conditions, a kill switch, recovery owner, and maintenance window. Stop on unexpected user impact, health-check failure, instability, resource pressure, or lost observability; do not retry automatically.
+- Start with one request or isolated invocation, change one dimension at a time, and stop when bounded evidence is sufficient. Downtime is not required.
+- Remove poison records, jobs, connections, files, and accounts; verify cleanup and recovery.
+
+Without active-test authorization, keep source-backed candidates visible and prove them only through safe analysis or isolated harnesses.
+
+## Availability Model
+
+Availability requires these invariants:
+
+- accepted inputs have bounded encoded/decoded size, depth, count, cardinality, expansion, and processing time;
+- principals and tenants have bounded concurrency, queueing, retained state, fan-out, and cost;
+- timeout, cancellation, disconnect, retry, and failure release all resources;
+- one malformed stored object cannot break a shared collection or worker;
+- expensive work is authorized, deduplicated, backpressured, and isolated.
+
+A security finding requires attacker control, meaningful cost asymmetry or durable failure, insufficient controls, and impact on another user or shared resource.
+
+## PR and White-Box Discovery
+
+Trace the full path:
+
+```text
+input -> decode/expand -> loop/match/allocate/wait/fan-out
+      -> retained/shared resource -> cleanup/error path
+```
+
+- Record attacker-controlled dimensions: bytes, claimed length, count, depth, unique keys, sparse offsets, regex, URL, retries, concurrency, and stored values.
+- Record the resource: CPU, memory, disk, descriptors, workers, connections, locks, queues, downstream calls, logs, or provider cost.
+- Verify that limits run before decode, allocation, fan-out, or enqueueing and apply per request, principal, tenant, worker, and service.
+- Read PR lines with callers, callees, alternate implementations, background consumers, and error/cleanup paths. One guarded caller does not close siblings reaching the same sink.
+- Flag new or widened regex, parsers, loops, recursion, batching, fan-out, allocations, retries, queues, concurrency, caches, logging, and stored-field schemas; also flag removed or delayed bounds, deadlines, cancellation, and isolation.
+- Prioritize import/export/preview/conversion, search/sort/filter/graphs, unauthenticated cryptographic work, webhooks, notifications, pools, and shared chats, feeds, announcements, dashboards, indexes, and caches.
+- When practical, run the same bounded harness on base and head. A regression strengthens evidence, but base behavior alone does not prove current impact.
+
+Useful search terms include `length`, `size`, `limit`, `depth`, `timeout`, `cancel`, `retry`, `queue`, `pool`, `semaphore`, `Promise.all`, task gathering, recursion, nested loops, dynamic regex, decompression, and allocation from claimed sizes.
+
+## Candidate Discipline
+
+Keep candidates separate from findings:
+
+```text
+HYPOTHESIS / CHALLENGED INVARIANT:
+SOURCE PATH / PREDICTED RESOURCE EFFECT:
+SMALLEST BOUNDED EXPERIMENT / MATCHED CONTROL:
+EXPECTED / OBSERVED RESULT:
+STATUS: unresolved | verified | disproved | blocked | superseded | duplicate
+STOPPING OR ENABLING LAYER / NEXT QUESTION:
+```
+
+- **Verified** requires the Validation gate. Static suspicion and scanner output are not findings.
+- **Disproved** requires evidence that current supported code or the real enforcement boundary blocks the semantic effect. A safe sibling, input, caller, or platform closes only itself.
+- **Blocked** means required authorization, environment, or observability is unavailable. Keep the candidate and missing experiment visible; blocked is neither safe nor reportable.
+- Failed tests must identify the stopping layer and whether another representation, caller, lifecycle stage, error path, platform, or build mode reaches the resource.
+- Validate instances independently, then group those sharing one failed assumption and centralized fix.
+
+Before closing a family, name and run the strongest remaining authorized bounded experiment, or record why it is disproved, blocked, or redundant.
+
+## Vulnerability Classes
+
+### ReDoS and Parser Complexity
+
+- Find nested quantifiers, overlapping alternatives, ambiguous repeated groups, backreferences, user-supplied patterns, repeated matching, ambiguous grammars, recursive parsing, globs, templates, and pathological queries/deserialization.
+- Resolve the actual engine and flags. Compare a late-failing/near-match input with a same-length ordinary control, including compilation and repeated-use costs.
+- Static warnings are candidates; confirm reachable growth in the deployed engine with a timeout-bounded harness.
+
+### Allocation and Structural Cardinality
+
+- Bound bytes, decoded size, items, unique keys, fragments, sparse gaps, streams, headers, multipart parts, depth, and per-item metadata independently. A byte cap does not bound object count.
+- Validate claimed dimensions before allocation; stream transformed data while enforcing expansion ratio and final size.
+- Include temporary files, caches, logs, traces, metric labels, and error objects in retained-state accounting.
+
+### Algorithmic, Fan-Out, Queue, and Concurrency Amplification
+
+- Find attacker-selected quadratic loops, scans, sorts, graph walks, wildcards, cache misses, batches, blocking event-loop work, unlimited task gathering, and missing semaphores.
+- Count database/HTTP/DNS/model/tool calls, notifications, files, and jobs per input; trace queue admission, capacity, deduplication, priority, retries, dead letters, and backpressure.
+- Verify disconnect/cancellation stops downstream work, retries share a budget and idempotency, slow work holds no broad lock, and high-cardinality cache keys cannot create unbounded misses or storage.
+
+### Resource Leaks and Slow Consumption
+
+- Follow descriptors, connections, temporary files, subprocesses, locks, transactions, buffers, and streams through success, error, early return, timeout, cancellation, and disconnect.
+- Prefer repeated unit tests with resource counters. Test slow-read/write or partial-body behavior only on a local server with strict connection and duration caps.
+
+### Persistent Poisoned-State DoS
+
+- Trace stored fields into shared chat, feed, announcement, dashboard, search, notification, export, sync, and moderation readers.
+- Find write/read validation drift and test web, mobile, API, admin, worker, search, and export paths, including replay after restart, reindex, cache rebuild, or sync.
+- One invalid record must be rejected or quarantined, not make the collection unreadable.
+
+Minimal proof: one bounded record breaks a shared feature for an unrelated reader in isolation, and correcting only that record restores it.
+
+## Safe Experimental Workflow
+
+1. State the bounded resource, affected population, and expected ceiling.
+2. Prove reachability: entrypoint, transforms, costly sink, guard placement, isolation boundary, and cleanup.
+3. Build an isolated harness with hard time, memory, process, and input caps.
+4. Use matched controls: equal-size benign/adversarial input or equal-byte low/high-cardinality input.
+5. Increase a few small sizes geometrically, one dimension at a time. Record CPU/wall time, memory, allocations, queue depth, downstream calls, errors, and cleanup; one slow sample proves nothing.
+6. Reproduce from clean state, confirm isolation/recovery, minimize the case, and stop.
+
+For explicitly authorized load testing, use fixed arrival rate, low ceilings, short duration, thresholds, and abort conditions. Save the script and limits; never improvise an open-ended request loop.
+
+## Tooling
+
+- **Semgrep / CodeQL / regex analyzers:** discover candidates; confirm dataflow and behavior in the actual runtime. Never submit private patterns to third-party analyzers.
+- **Hypothesis or project-native property testing:** generate bounded size, depth, shape, Unicode, and failure-position cases with deadlines.
+- **Native benchmarks and profilers:** measure the exact engine using JMH, BenchmarkDotNet, Go benchmarks, Criterion, `pytest-benchmark`, or project equivalents.
+- **k6:** only for an explicitly authorized monitored lab/staging target; watch duration, failures, dropped iterations, and target resources.
+
+Load the existing `semgrep`, `hypothesis`, or `python` tooling skill when needed. Tool output never replaces evidence.
+
+## Validation
+
+Promote only when all applicable conditions hold:
+
+- current supported code/artifact is tested and controlled input reaches the costly operation through a realistic path;
+- the missing/late bound, resource, affected population, and isolation boundary are identified;
+- repeated bounded matched controls establish asymmetry or growth, or one deterministic input causes a shared failure in an isolated real environment;
+- target-side resource, call-count, persistent-state, or error evidence rules out network/client noise and ordinary variance;
+- rate limits, deadlines, admission, cancellation, cleanup, restart behavior, and alternate paths are checked at the final enforcement boundary;
+- the minimal saved reproduction works from clean state and cleanup/recovery are independently verified.
+
+For poisoned state, an accepted object must break another user's shared reader or worker, and correcting only that object must restore service.
+
+## False Positives
+
+- Scanner output, a code smell, theoretical complexity, or a single timing sample without reachable controlled flow and matched evidence
+- Cost not controlled by the attacker, proportionate to input, or confined to the attacker's bounded isolated job
+- An unreachable pattern, proven linear-time engine, or small bound enforced before parse/allocation
+- Effective admission, concurrency, queue, cost, timeout, cancellation, cleanup, and isolation on every path
+- Client-only freezing with no stored, cross-user, or shared-worker effect
+- Atomic rejection/quarantine of invalid records, or graceful shedding that preserves critical and unrelated workloads
+
+Lack of permission for live stress testing is not counterevidence: retain the candidate as `blocked` or `unresolved`, but do not report it as confirmed.
+
+## Remediation
+
+- Enforce encoded/decoded size, count, depth, cardinality, expansion, fan-out, concurrency, and cost before expensive work.
+- Replace ambiguous backtracking with linear constructions, explicit parsing, atomic/possessive features where supported, or a non-backtracking engine.
+- Stream bounded data and reject unsafe claimed dimensions/expansion before materialization.
+- Apply scoped admission, bounded queues, backpressure, concurrency caps, retry budgets, deadlines, cancellation, and idempotency.
+- Isolate expensive work with resource-limited workers, bulkheads, and circuit breakers.
+- Validate on write, handle defensively on read, quarantine bad records, and guarantee cleanup on every exit path.
+
+## Summary
+
+Application-level DoS is usually a missing bound or isolation boundary, not massive traffic. Preserve candidates, experimentally disprove or verify them, and report only the smallest reproducible input causing demonstrated shared harm.