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
2,488 results · Feed
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High 8.9
amqp091-go has a Potential Memory Exhaustion/Protocol Violation via Broker-Controlled Oversized Payload
amqp091-go is a Go AMQP 0.9.1 client. Before version 1.13.0, a compromised or malicious AMQP broker can force the client to allocate resources for and process content body frames that exceed the negotiated frame_max limit. This can lead to unexpected memory c…
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Medium 6.5
Vulnerability in Oracle Java SE (component: 2D). Supported versions that are affected are Oracle Java SE: 7u511. Easily…
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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 12.8 before 19.1.7, 19.2 before 19.2.5, and 19.3 before 19.3.1 that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an authenticated user to cause a denial of service affecting backgroun…
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High 7.5
RustDesk < 1.4.7 Uncontrolled Memory Allocation DoS via BytesCodec
RustDesk versions before 1.4.7 contain an uncontrolled speculative memory allocation vulnerability in BytesCodec. Before authentication, the decoder trusts the payload length encoded in a four-byte frame header and reserves that amount before receiving the pa…
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High 7.5
stomper 5e2741e is vulnerable to Denial of Service. A malicious client can send partial STOMP frames and keep the TCP c…
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Medium 6.9
MCP PHP SDK: Unbounded SSE buffer in HttpTransport enables client-side denial of service
The MCP PHP SDK (Composer package mcp/sdk) is the official Model Context Protocol SDK for PHP. In versions 0.5.0 through 0.7.0, the HTTP client transport reads a Server-Sent Events response stream incrementally and appends each chunk to an in-memory buffer wi…
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High 7.5
eml_parser: DoS via deeply nested parens in Received headers
eml_parser serves as a python module for parsing eml files and returning various information found in the e-mail as well as computed information. Prior to 3.0.2, eml_parser.routing.noparenthesis in eml_parser/routing.py removes parenthesized CFWS comments fro…
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Medium 5.3
eml_parser: Parser DoS via deeply nested parentheses in e-mail headers
eml_parser serves as a python module for parsing eml files and returning various information found in the e-mail as well as computed information. Prior to 3.0.2, eml_parser.parser.HeaderParser.header_fetch_parse in eml_parser/parser.py uses email.utils.getadd…
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Medium 6.5
PraisonAI: Unauthenticated unbounded session accumulation in the PraisonAI MCP HTTP server (memory exhaustion; session TTL never enforced)
PraisonAI is a multi-agent teams system. Prior to praisonai 4.6.58, the MCP HTTP Stream mcp_post handler creates a new _sessions entry for every initialize request but does not call _cleanup_sessions or enforce a maximum. An unauthenticated caller can exhaust…
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High 7.5
QUIC ACK-only Packet Retention Can Cause Memory Exhaustion
Issue summary: When OpenSSL processes QUIC traffic from a peer that repeatedly sends ack-eliciting packets while not acknowledging ACK-only responses, the QUIC stack can retain ACK-only packet metadata for the lifetime of the connection. Impact summary: A rem…
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Medium 5.9
CMP Indefinite Cache Growth of ExtraCerts
Issue summary: The OpenSSL Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) caches additional certificates (extraCerts) sent in a CMP message, but never expunges them (for instance if they are invalid). If a server reuses an OSSL_CMP_CTX frequently, this cache of extraC…
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Medium 6.5
Ech0 before 4.7.3 Unauthenticated fav_count Modification
Ech0 through 4.5.6 registers the PUT /api/echo/like/:id endpoint on the public router group without authentication or rate limiting. Unauthenticated attackers can increment the fav_count counter of any echo (including private echoes) by supplying its UUID, wh…
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Medium —
vibeio-http has a DoS vulnerability in HTTP/1.x chunked encoding parser triggered by maliciously crafted chunk lengths
When using the affected versions of the `vibeio-http` crate, an attacker could craft a malicious HTTP/1.x request with a large chunk length (between `usize::MAX - 1` and `usize::MAX` inclusive) and send it, causing the server to crash (integer overflow panic …
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Critical 9.1
CakePHP: Potential Authentication bypass with CookieAuthenticator
CakePHP Authentication is an authentication plugin for CakePHP that can also be used in PSR-7 based applications. Versions before 2.11.2, from 3.0.0 through 3.3.6, and from 4.0.0 through 4.2.0 allow authentication bypass and potential CPU or memory exhaustion…
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High —
postgres-protocol: Unbounded SCRAM iteration count allows a malicious server to cause CPU-exhaustion denial of service
A malicious, compromised, or man-in-the-middle server can supply an arbitrarily large SCRAM-SHA-256 PBKDF2 iteration count during authentication. The client runs it inline with no upper bound, pinning a `tokio` worker thread for minutes per connection, possib…
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Medium 6.0
DJI Drone HTTP Media Server Denial of Service via Connection Pool Exhaustion
The HTTP media server on DJI drones does not enforce sufficient limits on incoming connections or request rates. An attacker with access to the drone's internal network can exhaust the server's connection pool by repeatedly requesting a stored media file, pre…
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High 7.5
Checkmate: Pre-auth Denial of Service via File Upload on Registration
Checkmate is an open-source, self-hosted tool designed to track and monitor server hardware, uptime, response times, and incidents in real-time with beautiful visualizations. Prior to 3.9.1, the public POST /api/v1/auth/register route in server/src/api/routes…
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High 7.5
Unbounded persistent session allocation via repeated initialize requests
The MCP Streamable HTTP server transport (WebFlux and WebMvc variants) does not place any limit on the number of sessions it retains, and by default does not require clients to be authenticated. As a result, a remote attacker can cause the server to accumulat…
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Medium 5.3
Micrometer Tracing Brave Bridge W3C Baggage propagation DoS vulnerability
An application using Micrometer Tracing with W3C baggage propagation in the Brave bridge is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) due to unbounded object allocation when extracting incoming baggage headers. Micrometer Tracing 1.7.0 Micrometer Tracing 1.6.0 - …
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Medium 5.5
Ghidra < 12.1.3 PDB Parser Uncontrolled Heap Growth DoS via AbstractPdb
Ghidra before 12.1.3 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in the PDB parser that allows attackers to terminate the Ghidra process by supplying a crafted PDB file with an oversized parameters section. The AbstractPdb deserialization rout…
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High 7.5
Vulnerabilities in IBM AIX and PowerVM VIOS
IBM AIX 7.2, and 7.3 and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1 could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service due to improper validation of an allocation size.
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High 7.5
Vulnerabilities in IBM AIX and PowerVM VIOS
IBM AIX 7.2, and 7.3 and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1 could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service due to improper validation of an array size field.
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High 7.5
An attacker that can reach a container's published TCP port may be able to force the host's forwarding process to buffe…
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Medium 5.3
Mailpit: SMTP DATA line reader buffers over-limit input before size enforcement
Mailpit is an email testing tool and API for developers. From 1.30.0 until 1.30.5, Mailpit's internal/smtpd/smtpd.go readData() function calls bufio.Reader.ReadBytes before applying the len(data)+len(line) size check to the completed SMTP DATA line against Se…
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High 8.7
HTTP/2 connection-window starvation pins Plug processes indefinitely in Bandit
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to pin an unbounded number of HTTP/2 stream processes indefinitely via connection-level flow control. When a stream's response body …
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Medium 5.3
Mailpit: Thumbnail generation decodes unbounded image dimensions before scaling
Mailpit is an email testing tool and API for developers. Prior to 1.30.4, Mailpit decodes attacker-supplied image attachments into a full raster before checking decoded dimensions, pixel count, or memory use in the GET /api/v1/message/{id}/part/{partID}/thumb…
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Medium 5.3
An unauthenticated remote peer can crash any NIOWebSocket-based server (including Vapor and Hummingbird) with a single …
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High —
netty-incubator-codec-ohttp: BinaryHttpParser should enforce limits for variable lengths fields
We don't enforce any limits for the encoded variable lengths that are used for fields. As the remote peer controls these it's easy for the remote peer to have us buffer data forever and so ultimately OOM.
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Medium 5.3
libgit2: Unbounded Memory Allocation via Delta Object Result-Size Header
libgit2 is a portable C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a linkable library with a solid API, allowing to build Git functionality into your application. Prior to 1.8.6 and 1.9.5, git_delta_apply in src/libgit2/delta.c trusts the attacker-con…
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Medium —
Zoo Design Studio: Recursive KCL parsing is vulnerable to denial-of-service
### Impact Feeding a KCL program that wraps an expression in deep, unnecessary parentheses triggers the parser’s recursive `expression` -> `unnecessarily_bracketed` -> `expression` path. With enough nesting, the call stack grows until it exceeds the process s…
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High 7.5
Libevent: Unbounded memory accumulation in WebSocket server via fragmented frames
Libevent is an event notification library. From 2.2.0-alpha-dev until 2.2.2-alpha, the libevent WebSocket server in ws.c accumulates fragmented frames in evws->incomplete_frames without enforcing a total message-size limit. An unauthenticated remote client ca…
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High 7.5
jsoup Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in XmlTreeBuilder
jsoup through 1.23.2, fixed in commit 862ba2f, contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in XmlTreeBuilder that allows remote attackers to exhaust JVM heap memory by supplying a deeply nested XML document with uniquely-namespaced elements. T…
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High 7.5
Ipa: freeipa: unauthenticated dos in `/ipa/i18n_messages` via unbounded request body read
A flaw was found in FreeIPA. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit a vulnerability in the `/ipa/i18n_messages` endpoint by sending an arbitrarily large request body. This can cause the service to consume excessive memory, leading to memory exhaustion…
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Medium 4.3
Ipa: freeipa: authenticated dos in `otptoken-add` via unbounded otp key decoding/re-encoding
A flaw was found in FreeIPA. A low-privilege authenticated user can exploit this vulnerability by submitting an oversized One-Time Password (OTP) key value. This oversized key is then decoded and re-encoded without proper size limits, consuming excessive CPU …
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High 7.5
Ipa: freeipa: unauthenticated dos in `/ipa/migration/migration.py` via unbounded request body read
A flaw was found in FreeIPA. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending oversized form POST requests to the `/ipa/migration/migration.py` endpoint. This can force the migration handler to read attacker-controlled request bodi…
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Medium 6.5
Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology Denial-of-Service
IBM Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology (RSCT) 3.0 could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service by sending a specially crafted request due improper input validation.
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Low 2.3
BuildKit: Possible runtime DoS via unbounded group parsing
BuildKit is a toolkit for converting source code to build artifacts in an efficient, expressive and repeatable manner. Prior to 0.31.1, BuildKit read attacker-controlled /etc/passwd and /etc/group files without an upper bound while resolving a username to a u…
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Medium 5.9
Snipe-IT: TOTP Brute-Forceable Due to Missing Rate Limiting on `POST /two-factor`
Snipe-IT is an IT asset/license management system. Prior to 8.6.1, POST /two-factor has no rate limiting, lockout, or attempt counter, allowing an attacker with valid credentials to submit unlimited TOTP guesses against the three accepted codes created by con…
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High 8.3
Tempo fee sponsorship in mpp bounds each transaction but not aggregate exposure, allowing concurrent sponsor-wallet drain
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in ZenHive mpp allows an unauthenticated remote client to drain the fee-payer wallet through concurrent sponsored payments, denying service to legitimate payers once it is empty. MPP.Methods.Tempo.FeePayerP…
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Medium 5.3
Cisco Industrial Ethernet 1000 Series Switches Denial of Service Vulnerability
A vulnerability in the handling of management plane packets by Cisco Industrial Ethernet (IE) 1000 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device manager, SSH, or API to become inaccessible.This vulnerability is due t…