CWE-400
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
AI Translation Available
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
Status
draft
Abstraction
class
Likelihood
high
Affected Platforms
Technical Details
AI Translation
Common Consequences
availability
access control
other
Impacts
dos: crash, exit, or restart
dos: resource consumption (cpu)
dos: resource consumption (memory)
dos: resource consumption (other)
bypass protection mechanism
other
Detection Methods
automated static analysis
automated dynamic analysis
fuzzing
Potential Mitigations
Phases:
architecture and design
implementation
Descriptions:
•
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.
•
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
•
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:
- recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or
- uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.
The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.
•
Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.