CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Description

Common consequences· 2

• Availability — DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory), DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
  If an attacker can trigger the allocation of the limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the most common result is denial of service. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment, i.e., the product may slow down, crash due to unhandled errors, or lock out legitimate users. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as well as its host operating system.
• Access Control / Other — Bypass Protection Mechanism, Other
  In some cases it may be possible to force the product to "fail open" in the event of resource exhaustion. The state of the product -- and possibly the security functionality - may then be compromised.

Potential mitigations· 4

• [Architecture and Design]Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
• [Architecture and Design]
• [Architecture and Design]Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
• [Implementation]Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 3

Exploits (incoming)3

Compliance frameworks addressing this (incoming)9

(incoming)35

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Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.