Weakness (CWE)
CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
How to prevent it (4 mitigations)
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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.
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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.
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Architecture and Design
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
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Implementation
Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.
Source: MITRE CWE-400
5 results · Clear filters · Feed
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High 7.5
SolarWinds Serv-U Unauthenticated Denial of Service Vulnerability
SolarWinds Serv-U is susceptible to specially crafted POST requests that crash the Serv-U service without authentication using Content-Encoding: deflate. Mitigation steps are provided to secure customer environments in the SolarWinds Trust Center if you are u…
KEV Jun 5, 2026 -
High 7.5
HTTP/2 Stream Cancellation Attack
The HTTP/2 protocol allows a denial of service (server resource consumption) because request cancellation can reset many streams quickly, as exploited in the wild in August through October 2023.
KEV Oct 10, 2023 -
High 7.5
.NET and Visual Studio Denial of Service Vulnerability
.NET and Visual Studio Denial of Service Vulnerability
KEV Aug 9, 2023 -
High 8.6CVE-2020-3569 Exploited
Cisco IOS XR Software DVMRP Memory Exhaustion Vulnerabilities
Multiple vulnerabilities in the Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) feature of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to either immediately crash the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) process or make it co…
KEV Nov 3, 2021 -
High 8.6CVE-2020-3566 Exploited
Cisco IOS XR Software DVMRP Memory Exhaustion Vulnerability
A vulnerability in the Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) feature of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust process memory of an affected device. The vulnerability is due to insufficient queue manageme…
KEV Nov 3, 2021