Weakness (CWE)
CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
The product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any intended restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated.
How to prevent it (8 mitigations)
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Requirements
Clearly specify the minimum and maximum expectations for capabilities, and dictate which behaviors are acceptable when resource allocation reaches limits.
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Architecture and Design
Limit the amount of resources that are accessible to unprivileged users. Set per-user limits for resources. Allow the system administrator to define these limits. Be careful to avoid CWE-410.
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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, and it will help the administrator to identify who is committing the abuse. 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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Implementation
Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does.
When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue."
Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
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Architecture and Design
For any security checks that are performed on the client side, ensure that these checks are duplicated on the server side, in order to avoid CWE-602. Attackers can bypass the client-side checks by modifying values after the checks have been performed, or by changing the client to remove the client-side checks entirely. Then, these modified values would be submitted to the server.
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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, typically by using increasing time delays
- 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 can be difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply requires 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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Architecture and Design, Implementation
If the program must fail, ensure that it fails gracefully (fails closed). There may be a temptation to simply let the program fail poorly in cases such as low memory conditions, but an attacker may be able to assert control before the software has fully exited. Alternately, an uncontrolled failure could cause cascading problems with other downstream components; for example, the program could send a signal to a downstream process so the process immediately knows that a problem has occurred and has a better chance of recovery.
Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.
Source: MITRE CWE-770
2,460 results · Feed
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Unscored —
Apache Axis2/Java: unbounded JSON request body buffering
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in Apache Axis2/Java. The JSON message builders, including the Gson, Moshi and HTTP/2 variants, buffered the entire request body with no size limit, so an unauthenticated caller could exhaust …
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Low 0.6
Uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in HTTP response handling of Qt Network impacts Qt Framework
Uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in the Qt Framework HTTP response handling functionality of the Qt Network module.
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Medium 6.5
Multiple security vulnerabilities are addressed with IBM Process Mining Interim Fix for October 2026
IBM Process Mining 2.0.0 through 2.2.1 could allow an authenticated attacker to cause a denial of service through insufficient rate limiting of email notifications, resulting in excessive emails being sent to targeted recipients.
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Low 3.7
rustls before 0.23.46 Denial of Service via Brotli Certificate Decompression
rustls before 0.23.46 contains an uncontrolled memory allocation flaw in its optional Brotli certificate decompression, which limits decompressed output size but accepts an input-selected large history window. Malicious peers can send a certificate with a fiv…
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High 7.5
Hickory DNS hickory-proto 0.3.1 before 0.26.1 CPU Exhaustion via BinEncoder Name Compression
Hickory DNS hickory-proto from 0.3.1 before 0.26.1 contains a denial of service vulnerability in BinEncoder that allows remote attackers to exhaust CPU through quadratic-time name compression. Attackers can send malicious DNS messages with many records that a…
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High 7.5
Hickory DNS 0.24.0 before 0.26.2 DoH Unbounded Request Body Denial of Service
Hickory DNS from 0.24.0 before 0.26.2 contains a resource exhaustion vulnerability that allows remote attackers to consume server memory via unbounded DoH request bodies. Attackers can send large request bodies over HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 to a DNS over HTTP server,…
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High 7.5
Hickory DNS 0.24.0 through 0.26.1 Memory Exhaustion via DNS-over-QUIC Requests
Hickory DNS 0.24.0 through 0.26.1 contains a memory exhaustion vulnerability that allows remote attackers to consume server resources by sending incomplete DNS-over-QUIC request bodies. Attackers can open many connections and send only large length prefixes, …
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High 7.5
Hickory DNS before 0.26.2 DoH Memory Exhaustion via Incomplete Request Bodies
Hickory DNS before 0.26.2 contains a resource exhaustion vulnerability in its DNS-over-HTTPS HTTP/2 server that lacks sufficient timeouts or limits for incomplete request bodies. Remote attackers can open DoH connections, send incomplete request bodies, and h…
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High 7.5
Devalue before 5.6.3 Denial of Service via Sparse Array Serialization
The devalue package for npm before 5.6.3 can consume excessive CPU and memory when serializing sparse arrays with uneval or stringify. An attacker who manages to get a sparse array created on the server, which mainstream wire formats do not allow, and seriali…
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High 7.5
Sveltejs devalue before 5.9.3 Memory Exhaustion via uneval Sparse Arrays
Sveltejs devalue from 1.0.0 before 5.9.3 contains a memory exhaustion flaw in uneval, whose generated code for sparse arrays allocates memory proportional to the array's declared length when evaluated. Attackers who can influence a very large sparse array ser…
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High 7.5
OpenAM before 16.1.4 Unauthenticated DoS via Unbounded Java Deserialisation
OpenAM before 16.1.4 contains a denial of service vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to exhaust server resources by sending serialized Java data without size or structure limits. Attackers can send small crafted requests to remote SDK endpoin…
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Medium 6.5
Vikunja before 2.7.1 Memory Exhaustion DoS via Trello, Todoist and Microsoft To Do Migrations
Vikunja before 2.7.1 allocates memory without limits in its Trello, Todoist and Microsoft To Do migration importers, which buffer remote attachment downloads and API responses in memory without size caps. Authenticated users can start a migration that referen…
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Medium 6.5
Vikunja before 2.7.1 Memory Exhaustion via Unbounded Avatar Size Cache
Vikunja before 2.7.1 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability that allows authenticated users to exhaust server memory by requesting avatars at many distinct sizes. Attackers can upload a noisy avatar and fetch it at each size up to 1024, c…
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Medium 6.5
Vikunja before 2.7.1 Memory Exhaustion DoS via WeKan and Vikunja-File Imports
Vikunja before 2.7.1 contains a denial of service vulnerability that allows authenticated users to exhaust API process memory by uploading WeKan or vikunja-file imports with no item-count cap. Attackers can submit a ~22 MB WeKan JSON with hundreds of thousand…
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Medium 4.3
Vikunja before 2.7.1 Resource Exhaustion via Vikunja-File ZIP Import
Vikunja before 2.7.1 contains a resource exhaustion vulnerability in the vikunja-file ZIP importer that allows authenticated users to consume CPU and memory by uploading archives with excessive entries. Attackers can upload export ZIPs containing many empty o…
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Medium 4.3
Vikunja before 2.7.1 Resource Exhaustion via CalDAV VTODO RELATED-TO Entries
Vikunja before 2.7.1 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability that allows authenticated CalDAV clients to create unbounded dummy tasks by sending VTODOs with thousands of RELATED-TO properties. Attackers can repeat unknown related UIDs in a…
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Medium 4.3
Vikunja before 2.7.1 Denial of Service via Unbounded Kanban Bucket Count
Vikunja before 2.7.1 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability that allows project writers or view admins to create unlimited kanban buckets due to missing count caps. Attackers can create thousands of buckets so every kanban read runs a tas…
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High 8.2
Unbounded request body accumulation on streaming RPCs causes memory exhaustion in grpc_server
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-grpc grpc_server allows unauthenticated attackers to exhaust memory and crash the node via an oversized client-streaming or bidirectional-streaming request body. The streaming read c…
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Medium 6.5
Hisense VIDAA Smart TV Unauthenticated DoS via SetAVTransportURI
Hisense VIDAA Smart TV firmware V0000.01.00a.P0220 contains an unauthenticated denial-of-service vulnerability in the UPnP/DLNA AVTransport SOAP service that allows LAN-adjacent attackers to freeze the entire television software layer by sending a crafted Set…
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High 7.5
Nuxt Content: Unauthenticated SQLite Function DoS via Content Query API
Nuxt Content is the file-based CMS for Nuxt applications, powered by Markdown and Vue components. From 3.0.0 until 3.15.2, the unauthenticated POST /__nuxt_content/:collection/query endpoint accepts an attacker-controlled sql field in src/runtime/api/query.po…
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High 8.7
Apache James: Denial of service upon MIME parsing
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Apache James Mime4J library prior version 0.8.15 allows Denial of Service upon parsing Mime messages. Users are recommended to upgrade to Apache James server 3.9.1 that relies on fixed MIME4J 0.8.15 whic…
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Unscored —
Apache James MIME4J: Denial of service due to Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Apache James Mime4J library prior version 0.8.15 allows Denial of Service upon parsing Mime messages. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 0.8.15 which fixes the issue by enforcing new limits and …
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Medium 4.9
Authenticated remote denial of service through unbounded zlib decompression in storeAnalysisStatistics
When an operator enables store.analysis_statistics_dir, a network client with PRODUCT_STORE permission for a product can call that product's storeAnalysisStatistics Thrift-over-HTTP method. CodeChecker 6.29.0 decodes the attacker-controlled Base64 string and …
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High 8.2
Cowboy HTTP/1.1 Unbounded Buffering of Pipelined Data During Request Handling Enables Memory Exhaustion
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust connection process memory over HTTP/1.1. Once a request has been received in full and its handler is still running, cow…
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High 8.7
Unbounded decoded HTTP/2 header-list size in cowlib cow_http2_machine enables HPACK amplification memory exhaustion
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows an unauthenticated remote peer to exhaust the memory of an HTTP/2 endpoint via HPACK-indexed header fields. cow_http2_machine:headers_decode/4 in src/cow_http2_machi…
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Low 3.1
In JetBrains YouTrack before 2026.2.19728 the attachment size limit could be bypassed via AI assistant thread conversion
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Unscored —
HTTP::Body versions before 1.24_02 for Perl parse the trailer in quadratic time
HTTP::Body versions before 1.24_02 for Perl parse the trailer in quadratic time. Everything after the last chunk in the same call to add() is parsed with HTTP::Headers, which takes time quadratic in the number of fields of one name. For example, it takes seve…
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High 7.5
Regexp2: Unbounded memory amplification via large `{m}` quantifier on a zero-width subexpression
Regexp2 is a feature-rich RegExp engine for Go. Prior to version 2.3.0, when regexp2 compiles and matches a pattern containing a large fixed-count quantifier applied to a zero-width subexpression — e.g. (?:){50000000} — the match engine executes the empty loo…
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High 7.5
Model Context Protocol TypeScript SDK: One HTTP request within the default size limit could exhaust server memory during validation
The Model Context Protocol TypeScript SDK provides TypeScript client and server implementations of the Model Context Protocol. From 1.3.0 until 1.32.0 in @modelcontextprotocol/sdk and from 2.0.0 until 2.3.0 in @modelcontextprotocol/server, HTTP servers did no…
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High 8.2CVE-2026-77622 Public exploit
Sliver: Unauthenticated Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service in Sliver HTTP(S) Listener PNG Decoder
Sliver is a command and control framework. Prior to 1.7.6, an HTTP(S) listener using the PNG encoder accepts attacker-controlled PNG dimensions without an effective decoded-size or pixel limit in util/encoders/images.go, while the listener nonce space impleme…
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Medium 6.3
Pillow: EPS load(scale) lets Ghostscript render past the decompression bomb limit
Pillow is a Python imaging library. In versions 2.3.0 through 12.3.0, EPS rendering does not validate the scaled image dimensions before invoking Ghostscript. Applications that process untrusted EPS or PostScript files using an application-selected scale grea…
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High 7.7
OpenHuman: Unauthenticated dictation WebSocket allows arbitrary audio streaming and unbounded memory growth
OpenHuman is an open-source agent harness available as a desktop application and Rust library. Before version 0.57.44, its local /ws/dictation WebSocket endpoint lacks client authentication and browser-origin validation. An unauthenticated client, including…
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Medium 6.5
anacrolix/torrent through 1.61.0 Memory Exhaustion via Unbounded HTTP Tracker Response
anacrolix/torrent through 1.61.0 contains a memory exhaustion vulnerability in the tracker/http package that allows malicious trackers to crash clients by returning unbounded responses. Attackers controlling an HTTP tracker in a torrent file or magnet link ca…
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Unscored —
Apache OFBiz: Denial of Service via unauthenticated userTenantId in multitenant mode
In multitenant deployments, ContextFilter and LoginWorker built a per-tenant delegator name from a request-supplied userTenantId parameter and requested a delegator for it before confirming the tenant existed. DelegatorFactory's internal cache retains every d…
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High 7.5
Apache OFBiz: Unbounded multi-form row count from a parameter name
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in ServiceMultiEventHandler in Apache OFBiz 24.09 before 24.09.08 on all platforms allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to pin a server request thread for an attacker-chosen number of synchronous service dispatches, up to…
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High 8.7
Apache Juneau: Denial of service via unbounded memory allocation in parsers and REST request handling
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in Apache Juneau. The MessagePack parser, which the REST server enables by default, sizes buffers from length values in the input. An unauthenticated client can send a few bytes that force a m…
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High 7.5
h2o: heap exhaustion using capsules
h2o is an HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. Prior to commit 4212ce114506a073505fd389db16ad2ba4e582a0, a client could send an incomplete CONNECT-UDP Capsule with an excessively large declared length, causing H2O to keep buffering receiv…
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Medium 6.5
Zulip: Missing content-length limit on POST /messages/render allows denial-of-service via oversized requests
Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool. In Zulip Server versions through 12.1, the authenticated POST /messages/render endpoint renders the content parameter without enforcing the normal message length limit used by message send and edit operations. …
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High 8.9
Unbounded query cache growth from interpolated JSON paths and splice lists in Ecto
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-ecto ecto allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust memory in the application and in the database server by sending requests with distinct JSON keys or list lengths where …
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High 7.1
Apache ZooKeeper: Denial of service through unbounded memory allocation in multiRead request handling
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in the multiRead request handler of Apache ZooKeeper allows a remote attacker to crash the server (denial of service) with a single small request. The multiRead handler places no limit on the number of bund…