Distributed Denial Of Service in Fiber with Cockroachdb

A DDoS scenario involving Fiber and CockroachDB typically emerges when high-concurrency request patterns saturate database connections, exhaust thread pools, or amplify latency under load. This combination is vulnerable because Fiber’s performance-oriented design can push many simultaneous requests into CockroachDB, which relies on consistent latency and controlled resource usage to maintain availability. When requests repeatedly open long-lived or uncontrolled database sessions, connection pool exhaustion or transaction contention can manifest as service degradation.

For example, unbounded query concurrency without context timeouts can cause threads to wait on CockroachDB for longer than expected, leading to hung goroutines and thread starvation in the Fiber runtime. Inadequate query patterns—such as missing indexes on frequently filtered columns or large scans without pagination—increase load on CockroachDB nodes, which can propagate latency across the service chain. These conditions align with common attack vectors like resource saturation and slowloris-style keep-alive abuse, where clients maintain open connections to exhaust server-side limits.

Operational factors also matter: if retries are implemented without jitter or rate limiting, a spike in client requests can trigger a thundering herd against CockroachDB, intensifying contention. Because CockroachDB distributes data across nodes, poorly partitioned schemas or unbalanced workloads can create hotspots, making some nodes a bottleneck during high traffic. Without proper instrumentation, these interactions are hard to detect until availability declines. middleBrick can detect this class of availability risk during unauthenticated scans, identifying missing rate limiting and input validation that may exacerbate DDoS conditions in this stack.

Apply structured context timeouts and controlled concurrency when accessing CockroachDB from Fiber handlers. Use context.WithTimeout to bound query duration and prevent hung requests from accumulating. Limit parallel executions with worker pools or semaphore patterns to avoid overwhelming the database.

// Fiber handler with context timeout and semaphore-based concurrency control
package main

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
	"time"

	"github.com/gofiber/fiber/v2"
	"github.com/jackc/pgx/v5/pgxpool"
)

var db *pgxpool.Pool
var semaphore = make(chan struct{}, 30) // limit concurrent DB operations

func queryHandler(c *fiber.Ctx) error {
	// Respect context cancellation from the client or upstream
	ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(c.Context(), 2*time.Second)
	defer cancel()

	// Acquire semaphore slot to bound parallelism
	semaphore <- struct{}{}
	defer func() { <-semaphore }()

	var status string
	// Use context-aware query to enforce timeout at the driver level
	row := db.QueryRow(ctx, "SELECT status FROM accounts WHERE user_id = $1", c.Params("userID"))
	if err := row.Scan(&status); err != nil {
		return c.Status(http.StatusInternalServerError).JSON(fiber.Map{"error": err.Error()})
	}
	return c.JSON(fiber.Map{"status": status})
}

func main() {
	var err error
	// Use connection pool with sensible settings for CockroachDB
	db, err = pgxpool.NewWithConfig(context.Background(), &pgxpool.Config{
		ConnConfig: pgxpool.ConnConfig{
			ConnString: "postgresql://user:password@host:26257/dbname?sslmode=require",
		},
		MaxConns: 25,
	})
	if err != nil {
		panic(fmt.Errorf("unable to connect to CockroachDB: %w", err))
	}
	defer db.Close()

	app := fiber.New()
	app.Get("/account/:userID", queryHandler)
	app.Listen(":3000")
}