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
1,166 results · Clear filters · Feed
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Medium 5.1
malcontent: Disk Space Exhaustion via Globally Accessible D-Bus API
The newly introduced RecordUsage D-Bus method https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pwithnall/malcontent/-/blob/0.14.0/libmalcontent-timer/child-timer-service.c in malcontent-timerd allows arbitrary users in the system to slowly fill up disk space in /var/lib/malcon…
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Medium 4.3
Post-authentication CPU utilization DoS via $trim/$ltrim/$rtrim operators
Using a densely populated chars mask and a large input string in the MongoDB aggregation operators $trim, $ltrim, and $rtrim, an authenticated user with aggregation permissions can pin CPU utilization at 100% for an extended period of time. This issue impacts…
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Medium 4.3
An attacker can cause uncontrolled memory usage with excessive bracing over IMAP. The fix in CVE-2026-27857 was incompl…
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Medium 6.0
net-imap: Denial of service via high iteration count for `SCRAM-*` authentication
Net::IMAP implements Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) client functionality in Ruby. From versions 0.4.0 to before 0.4.24, 0.5.0 to before 0.5.14, and 0.6.0 to before 0.6.4, when authenticating a connection with SCRAM-SHA1 or SCRAM-SHA256, a hostile ser…
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Medium 5.3
ZEBRA: Allocation Amplification in Inbound Network Deserializers
ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to zebrad version 4.4.0, prior to zebra-chain version 7.0.0, and prior to zebra-network version 6.0.0, several inbound deserialization paths in Zebra allocated buffers sized against generic transport or bl…
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Medium 6.5
Apache CloudStack: Domain/account resources limits not honored
Due to multiple time-of-check time-of-use race conditions in the resource count check and increment logic, as well as missing validations, users of the platform are able to exceed the allocation limits configured for their accounts/domains. This can be used b…
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Medium 6.3
Denial of service vulnerability in GitHub Enterprise Server allowed service disruption via unauthenticated API endpoint
A denial of service vulnerability was identified in GitHub Enterprise Server that allowed an unauthenticated attacker to cause service disruption by sending crafted requests with deeply nested JSON payloads to an unauthenticated API endpoint. The endpoint par…
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Medium 4.3
Incus: Unbounded binary import disk exhaustion
Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager. Prior to version 7.0.0, uploads of large amount of data by authenticated users can run the Incus server out of disk space, potentially taking down the host system. The impact here is limited for anyone …
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Medium 5.3
Incus: Unbounded YAML Metadata Decode via Parsing
Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager. Prior to version 7.0.0, user provided image and backup tarballs would be unpacked and YAML files parsed without any size restrictions. This was making it easy for an authenticated user to provide a craf…
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Medium —
hickory-proto vulnerable to CPU exhaustion during message encoding due to O(n²) name compression
During message encoding, `hickory-proto`'s `BinEncoder` stores pointers to labels that are candidates for name compression in a `Vec<(usize, Vec<u8>)>`. The name compression logic then searches for matches with a linear scan. A malicious message with many rec…
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Medium 5.3
OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OneCollector vulnerable to denial of service via unbounded HTTP error response body
OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OneCollector is a .NET exporter that sends telemetry to a OneCollector back-end over HTTP. In versions 1.15.0 and earlier, when a request to the configured back-end or collector results in an unsuccessful HTTP 4xx or 5xx response, the H…
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Medium 5.9
Unbounded HTTP response body read in OpenTelemetry.Resources.Azure
OpenTelemetry.Resources.Azure is the .NET resource detector for Azure environments. In versions 1.15.0-beta.1 and earlier, the AzureVmMetaDataRequestor class makes HTTP requests to the Azure VM instance metadata service and reads the response body into memory…
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Medium 5.3
OpenTelemetry .NET Zipkin exporter has unbounded remote endpoint cache leading to memory growth
OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin is the .NET Zipkin exporter for OpenTelemetry. In versions 1.15.2 and earlier, the Zipkin exporter remote endpoint cache accepts unbounded key growth derived from span attributes. In high-cardinality scenarios, a process using Zi…
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Medium 6.9
Vert.x has a DoS via unbounded server-side SNI SslContext cache growth
A TCP client can perform a TLS handshake and present the server name extension with a server name that is accepted by a server wildcard name, e.g. if the server is configured with a certificate accepting *.example.com, any XYZ.example.com where xyz is a valid…
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Medium 5.3
GraphQL-Ruby's Ruby lexer does not count comment tokens for the purposes of max_query_string_tokens
GraphQL-Ruby's `max_query_string_tokens` configuration didn't count comment tokens against the limit, allowing strings to be processed even after the configured maximum had actually been reached. In patched versions, the Ruby lexer does count these tokens. Gr…
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Medium 5.9
An issue in Assimp v.6.0.2 allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service via the FBXParser.cpp, ParseVectorData…
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Medium 4.9
Unbounded Memory Allocation in VQLResponse Result-Set Writer
Velociraptor versions prior to 0.76.4 contain a resource exhaustion vulnerability in the server's agent control channel. This allows a compromised or rogue Velociraptor client to crash the server via out-of-memory (OOM) by sending crafted messages through the…
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Medium 6.9
HTTP/2 frame size limit checked after body is buffered in bandit
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows unauthenticated memory exhaustion via oversized HTTP/2 frames. 'Elixir.Bandit.HTTP2.Frame':deserialize/2 in lib/bandit/http2/frame.ex checks the SETTINGS_MAX_FRAME_SIZ…
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Medium 5.3
An issue was discovered in Prosody before 0.12.6 and 1.0.0 through 13.0.0 before 13.0.5. A Denial of Service can occur …
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Medium 6.5
IBM® Db2® is vulnerable to a denial of service with a specially crafted query when stmtheap is set to automatic
IBM Db2 11.5.0 through 11.5.9, and 12.1.0 through 12.1.3 for Linux, UNIX and Windows (includes DB2 Connect Server) could allow an authenticated user to cause a denial of service using a specially crafted SQL query due to improper allocation of system resource…
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Medium 4.3
OpenClaw < 2026.4.8 - Improper Base64 Decoding Size Validation
OpenClaw before 2026.4.8 contains improper input validation in base64 decode paths that allocate memory before enforcing decoded-size limits. Attackers can exploit multiple code paths to cause memory exhaustion or denial of service through crafted base64-enco…
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Medium 4.3
OpenClaw < 2026.3.31 - Disk Exhaustion via Media Download Bypass
OpenClaw before 2026.3.31 contains a resource exhaustion vulnerability in media downloads that bypasses core safety limits for file size, count, and cleanup operations. Attackers can exhaust disk space by downloading media files without triggering intended sa…
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Medium 5.3
OpenClaw < 2026.3.31 - Resource Consumption via Oversized WebSocket Frames in voice-call
OpenClaw before 2026.3.31 contains an incomplete fix for CVE-2026-32062 where the voice-call component parses large WebSocket frames before start validation. Remote attackers can send oversized pre-start WebSocket frames to cause resource consumption and deni…
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Medium 5.3
OpenClaw < 2026.3.31 - Resource Consumption via Discord Audio Preflight Before Member Authorization
OpenClaw before 2026.3.31 performs Discord audio preflight transcription before validating member authorization, allowing unauthenticated attackers to consume resources. Remote attackers can trigger audio preflight processing without member allowlist validati…
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Medium 6.9
Axios: unbounded recursion in toFormData causes DoS via deeply nested request data
Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Prior to 1.15.1 and 0.31.1, toFormData recursively walks nested objects with no depth limit, so a deeply nested value passed as request data crashes the Node.js process with a RangeError. This …
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Medium 5.3
Axios: HTTP adapter streamed responses bypass maxContentLength
Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Prior to 1.15.1 and 0.31.1, when responseType: 'stream' is used, Axios returns the response stream without enforcing maxContentLength. This bypasses configured response-size limits and allows u…
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Medium 5.3
Axios: HTTP adapter streamed uploads bypass maxBodyLength when maxRedirects: 0
Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Prior to 1.15.1 and 0.31.1, for stream request bodies, maxBodyLength is bypassed when maxRedirects is set to 0 (native http/https transport path). Oversized streamed uploads are sent fully even…
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Medium 5.3
OpenClaw < 2026.3.31 - Denial of Service via LINE Webhook Handler Pre-Auth Concurrency
OpenClaw before 2026.3.31 lacks a shared pre-auth concurrency budget on the public LINE webhook path, allowing attackers to cause transient availability loss. Remote attackers can flood the webhook endpoint with concurrent requests before signature verificati…
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Medium 6.5
OpenClaw < 2026.3.31 - Decompression Bomb Denial of Service via Image Pixel-Limit Guard Bypass
OpenClaw before 2026.3.31 contains a decompression bomb vulnerability in image processing that fails to properly enforce pixel-limit guards on sips. Attackers can exploit this by uploading oversized images to cause denial of service through excessive memory c…
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Medium 5.9
Unbounded HTTP response body read in OpenTelemetry.Sampler.AWS
The AWS X-Ray Remote Sampler package provides a sampler which can get sampling configurations from AWS X-Ray. Prior to 0.1.0-alpha.8, OpenTelemetry.Sampler.AWS reads unbounded HTTP response bodies from a configured AWS X-Ray remote sampling endpoint into memo…
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Medium 5.9
OpenTelemetry dotnet: Potential memory exhaustion via unbounded pooled-list sizing in Jaeger exporter conversion path
OpenTelemetry dotnet is a dotnet telemetry framework. In 1.6.0-rc.1 and earlier, OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Jaeger may allow sustained memory pressure when the internal pooled-list sizing grows based on a large observed span/tag set and that enlarged size is reus…
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Medium 5.3
Nimiq has Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in its libp2p request/response
nimiq-libp2p is a Nimiq network implementation based on libp2p. Prior to version 1.3.0, `MessageCodec::read_request` and `read_response` call `read_to_end()` on inbound substreams, so a remote peer can send only a partial frame and keep the substream open. be…
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Medium 6.5
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in GitLab
GitLab has remediated an issue in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 10.6 before 18.9.6, 18.10 before 18.10.4, and 18.11 before 18.11.1 that could have allowed an authenticated user to cause denial of service under certain conditions by exhausting serve…
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Medium 6.5
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in GitLab
GitLab has remediated an issue in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 12.4 before 18.9.6, 18.10 before 18.10.4, and 18.11 before 18.11.1 that could have allowed an authenticated user to cause denial of service by overwhelming system resources under certa…
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Medium 6.5
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in GitLab
GitLab has remediated an issue in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 9.2 before 18.9.6, 18.10 before 18.10.4, and 18.11 before 18.11.1 that could have allowed an authenticated user to cause denial of service due to insufficient resource allocation limit…
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Medium 6.5
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in GitLab
GitLab has remediated an issue in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 12.3 before 18.9.6, 18.10 before 18.10.4, and 18.11 before 18.11.1 that under certain conditions could have allowed an authenticated user to cause denial of service when importing issu…
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Medium 5.3
Outgoing DoH excessive memory allocation
A client can trigger excessive memory allocation by generating a lot of queries that are routed to an overloaded DoH backend, causing queries to accumulate into a buffer that will not be released until the end of the connection.
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Medium 5.3
DoQ/DoH3 excessive memory allocation
A client can trigger excessive memory allocation by generating a lot of errors responses over a single DoQ and DoH3 connection, as some resources were not properly released until the end of the connection.
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Medium 5.3
Resource exhaustion via DoQ/DoH3 connections
An attacker can create a large number of concurrent DoQ or DoH3 connections, causing unlimited memory allocation in DNSdist and leading to a denial of service. DOQ and DoH3 are disabled by default.
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Medium 5.3
Insufficient input validation of internal webserver
An attacker can send a web request that causes unlimited memory allocation in the internal web server, leading to a denial of service. The internal web server is disabled by default.