[tor-access] Predicting effectiveness

John Graham-Cumming jgc at cloudflare.com
Mon Oct 3 19:28:48 UTC 2016


On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 8:18 PM, Jeff Burdges <burdges at gnunet.org> wrote:

> Ok.  GETs are not supposed to modify resources, right?  So they should
> be considerably safer than POSTs, right?
>

When we are thinking about security (rather than the functionality of a web
application) there is often little difference between a GET and a POST.
Consider the following examples:

1. Benign GET / repeated 1000 times per second. That's a DoS on the server

2. Shellshock. Looks like a benign GET / but nasty payload in User-Agent
header

3. Simple GET but with SQLi in the URI

What are the concerns for GETs?  Also, do those concerns apply to truly
> static content even?
>

Depends what you mean by 'static content'. If a web site was served
entirely from Cloudflare's cache then I wouldn't be worried about #1, #2 or
#3 above. Any time we hit the origin web server I would worry.
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