Monero: DoS for remote nodes using Slow Loris attack

Summary:

Using the slow loris attack it’s possible to make the the daemon unresponsive to all RPC requests without at least a restart.

Description:

I used this node.js application (https://www.npmjs.com/package/sloww) to perform the attack on one of my remote nodes, but any other implementation of the attack should also work fine.

Releases Affected:

• Ubuntu 16.04 x64 - Monero v0.12.3.0 was affected so all releases before should be affected as well.

Steps To Reproduce:

1. Start the daemon with standard remote node parameters like ./monerod --rpc-bind-ip 0.0.0.0 --confirm-external-bind
2. Start the slow loris attack, I tested with 1000 sockets opened and 700 milliseconds as rate at which
   packets should be sent.
3. Try sending a normal RPC command like curl -X POST http://IP:18089/json_rpc -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"0","method":"get_block_count"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' there will not be any response from the RPC a few seconds after the attack was started.

Impact

An attacker could target a large number of remote nodes for example the ones under https://moneroworld.com/, with just a single PC.