CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

MITRE CWE weakness

Description

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Common consequences

• Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory), DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
• Access Control, Other: Bypass Protection Mechanism, Other

Mitigations

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 — 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.

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.

References

• CWE page: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/400.html
• CWE list: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/index.html