Understanding Memcrashed Vulnerability: Key/Value Databases

Running head: MEMCRASHED VULNERABILITY
MEMCRASHED VULNERABILITY
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Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................2
Discussion......................................................................................................................2
Principles of key/value databases...............................................................................2
Memcached................................................................................................................3
Working and functioning of memcached...................................................................3
Memcrashed attack.....................................................................................................5
Working of memcrashed attacks................................................................................5
Mitigation strategies of memcrashed attack...............................................................6
Analysis of future importance of this exploit.............................................................7
Conclusion......................................................................................................................8
References......................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
This report aims to discuss the topic of memcrashed vulnerability. The principles of
the key/value databases is briefly discussed in this report with the example of the use of the
key/value databases. The description of the memcrashed exploit is briefly discussed in this
report. The solutions of memcrashed exploit is briefly discussed. An analysis of the possible
future importance and the effectiveness of the memcrased exploit is briefly indicated in the
report. The report concludes with a conclusion for the report.
Discussion
Principles of key/value databases
Key-value database is the paradigm of data storage that is designed for the storage,
retrieval, and management of the associative arrays, data structure that is popularly known as
the hash table or dictionary (Lim et al. 2013). The dictionaries comprises of the collection of
records or objects that comprises of the fields in them and each comprising of data. The
storing and the retrieval of the records is done using any key that uniquely identifies the
record, and it is utilised for the easy finding of the data in the database. The key-value
databases functions in immensely dissimilar methods from the commonly known RDB or the
relational databases. The exposing of the data types to programs of the database permits it to
perform the application of the numerous optimisations (Chalamalasetti et al. 2013). The
systems of the key-value treats the data as the sole collection that is opaque that might consist
of dissimilar fields for each record. This provides the considerable flexibility and follows the
modern concepts like the programming that is object-oriented. As the representation of the
optional values is not done by the placeholders or the parameters of input as in the majority
of the RDBs, the key value databases frequently utilises significantly lower memory for
storing the similar database that could lead to the huge gains in the performance in the

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particular workloads. The performance in the particular workloads (Lavasani, Angepat and
Chiou 2014). The performance, lack of standardisation and any other issues restricted the
systems of key-value to niche the uses for significant time. Several graph databases are the
key-value databases internally as it adds the concept of relationships among the records as the
first class data type.
Memcached
The aspect of Memcached is the commonly used distributed system of memory
caching. It is commonly utilised for the speeding up websites that are driven by the dynamic
databases by the caching of the data along with the objects in RAM for reducing number of
the times any reading of the external source of data has to be done (Ruan et al. 2014).
Memcached is the open-source and free software. This system executes on the operating
systems like Unix and it also functions on Microsoft Windows. This depends on the libevent
library. The API of memcached offers huge hash table that is distributed through several
machines. In the situation when this table becomes full, the successive inserts leads the
purging of the older data in the LRU order, which denotes to the Least Recently Used. The
applications that are using the memcached commonly layers the additions and requests in the
RAM before falling back on the slower store of backing like the databases (Xu et al. 2014).
The memcached consist of no internal mechanism for tracking the misses that might happen.
Moreover, several utilities of any third party offers this functionality.
Working and functioning of memcached
This systems utilises the architecture of client server. The servers maintains the
associative arrays of key-value, then the clients populates the array and then queries it by the
key (Carra and Michiardi 2014). The length of the keys could be upto 250 bytes and the
values could be maximum 1 megabyte in the size. The clients utilises the libraries of the
client side for contacting with the servers that are by default exposes the service at the port