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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Medium 5.3
OpenStack Ironic: Crafted JSON String to Certain Endpoints on the API or JSON-RPC Service May Result in Service Crash
In OpenStack Ironic 32 before 37.0.0, an unauthenticated malicious user could submit a crafted JSON string to some endpoints on the API or JSON-RPC service and effect a service crash.
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Medium 5.3
quic-go: HTTP/3 QPACK Trailer Expansion Memory Exhaustion
quic-go is an implementation of the QUIC protocol in Go. Prior to version 0.59.1, an attacker can cause excessive memory allocation in quic-go's HTTP/3 client and server implementations by sending a QPACK-encoded HEADERS frame that decodes into a large traile…
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High 7.5
Dell BSAFE SSL-J contains an allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability. An unauthenticated rem…
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Medium 6.5
A missing upper-bound check in the udpif_set_threads() function of Open vSwitch v3.6.90 allows an attacker with OVSDB w…
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Medium 5.3
Unbounded WebSocket message and frame sizes can cause unauthenticated remote denial of service
daphne before 4.2.2 did not pass maxFramePayloadSize or maxMessagePayloadSize to Autobahn's WebSocketServerFactory. Because Autobahn defaults both values to 0 (unlimited), an unauthenticated remote attacker could send arbitrarily large WebSocket messages or f…
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High 8.2
SolarWinds Web Help Desk Denial-of-Service Vulnerability
SolarWinds Web Help Desk is found to be affected by a denial-of-service vulnerability, which when exploited, could cause the Web Help Desk server to crash due to insufficient memory.
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High 8.2
Atom table exhaustion via untrusted URL scheme in Tesla.Adapter.Mint
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-tesla tesla allows denial of service via atom table exhaustion in Tesla.Adapter.Mint. Tesla.Adapter.Mint.open_conn/2 converts the URL scheme of every outgoing request to a BEAM atom …
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Low 2.3
Pterodactyl has a database resource limit bypass via race condition in Client API
Pterodactyl is a free, open-source game server management panel. Prior to version 1.12.3, the Pterodactyl Client API has a logic flaw that lets users bypass their assigned limits for database allocations. This happens because the database locking mechanism us…
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High 7.5
React Router vulnerable to Denial of Service via reflected user input in single-fetch
React Router is a router for React. In versions 7.7.0 through 7.13.1, when using React Router's unstable React Server Components (RSC) APIs, there is a potential client-side Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the RSC redirect handling if redirects co…
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Medium 5.3
NiceGUI: Unauthenticated log-flood DoS via trailing slash on ESM and per-component resource routes
NiceGUI is a Python-based UI framework. Prior to version 3.12.0, two FastAPI routes that serve per-component static assets in NiceGUI accept a sub-path parameter that may resolve to a directory rather than a file. Requests that resolve to a directory raise an…
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Medium 5.1
OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation: CappedConcurrentHashMap leaks keys after removals
OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation provides eBPF instrumentation based on the OpenTelemetry standard. Prior to version 0.9.0, the custom CappedConcurrentHashMap introduced for Java TLS state tracking never removes keys from its insertion-order queue when entr…
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High 8.2
HTTP/2 CONTINUATION flood in Mint client via unbounded header-block accumulation
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-mint Mint allows attacker-controlled HTTP/2 servers to exhaust memory in a Mint client (HTTP/2 CONTINUATION flood). When Mint's HTTP/2 receive path observes a HEADERS frame without t…
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High 8.2
Unbounded conn.streams growth in Mint HTTP/2 client via unenforced PUSH_PROMISE concurrency
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-mint Mint allows attacker-controlled HTTP/2 servers to exhaust memory in a Mint client via PUSH_PROMISE flooding. In lib/mint/http2.ex, Mint.HTTP2.decode_push_promise_headers_and_add…
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Medium 4.3
Nanobot < 0.2.1 Denial of Service via Matrix Media Download Handler
Nanobot prior to version 0.2.1 contains a denial of service vulnerability in the Matrix channel media download handler that allows authenticated room members to exhaust process memory and bandwidth by sending media events with missing or invalid size metadata…
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Medium 5.7
Unbounded cache for function definitions
OOM error is possible while attempting to add infinite amount of functions to Function Registry. Affected Spring Products and Versions: Spring Cloud Function 3.2.x: versions prior to 3.2.16 Spring Cloud Function 4.1.x: versions prior to 4.1.10 Spring Cloud Fu…
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Medium 5.0
Openshift: openshift: non-admin user can bypass resourcequota and flood etcd with events causing cluster-wide api degradation
A flaw was found in OpenShift Container Platform. Completed pods with restartPolicy: Never do not count toward ResourceQuota pod limits, and Kubernetes events are not quota-scoped. A non-privileged user who can create pods in a namespace can exploit this to g…
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High 7.5
Apache Fluss Netty Frame Decoder Memory Exhaustion Vulnerability
Apache Fluss versions prior to 0.9.1 configure the Netty LengthFieldBasedFrameDecoder with Integer.MAX_VALUE as the maximum frame length, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to exhaust JVM heap memory on TabletServer and CoordinatorServer by sending spe…
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Medium 5.7
Email with special content can lead to DoS
An uncontrolled allocation of resources without limits or throttling in the e-mail handling in OTRS allows excessive allocation which may lead to the abortion of the webserver.This issue affects OTRS: * 8.0.X * 2023.X * 2024.X * 2025.X * 2026.X before 2026.4.…
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High 7.5
Excessive resource consumption in PackBits decompression in golang.org/x/image/tiff
The TIFF decoder does not place a limit on the size of PackBits-compressed data. A maliciously-crafted image can exploit this to cause a small image (both in terms of pixel width/height and encoded size) to make the decoder decode large amounts of compressed …
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Medium 5.3
cpp-httplib DoS: Negative chunk-size in chunked Transfer-Encoding
cpp-httplib is a C++11 single-file header-only cross platform HTTP/HTTPS library. Prior to 0.43.4, negative chunk-size in chunked Transfer-Encoding causes unbounded memory allocation and process crash. The ChunkedDecoder::read_payload function in cpp-httplib …
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High 8.6
Klever-Go MultiDataInterceptor: remote OOM via crafted compressed P2P payload
Klever-Go is the Go implementation of the Klever blockchain protocol. Prior to 1.7.17, a remote, unauthenticated denial-of-service vulnerability in Batch.Decompress (data/batch/batch.go) allows any peer that participates in a topic served by MultiDataIntercep…
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Medium 4.6
Indian Scout Bobber 2025 WCM brute-force
Uncontrolled resource consumption in the Wireless Control Module (WCM) of the Indian Motorcycle Scout Bobber + Tech 2025 model year allows an adjacent-network attacker with write access to the in-vehicle network to permanently immobilize the motorcycle. The W…
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Medium 5.4
AutoGPT: Credit system bypassed via direct block execution in POST /api/blocks/{block_id}/execute
AutoGPT is a workflow automation platform for creating, deploying, and managing continuous artificial intelligence agents. Prior to 0.6.59, POST /api/blocks/{block_id}/execute endpoint executes blocks without consuming any credits, regardless of the user's ba…
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Medium 5.3
opentelemetry-java: Unbounded Memory Allocation in W3C Baggage Propagation
opentelemetry-java is the Java implementation of the OpenTelemetry API for recording telemetry, and SDK for managing telemetry recorded by the API. Prior to 1.62.0, a vulnerability affects the baggage propagation implementation in opentelemetry-api and opente…
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Medium 6.8
Synapse CPU starvation (Denial of Service)
Synapse is an open source Matrix homeserver implementation. Prior to 1.152.1, local authenticated users can cause Synapse to starve other requests of CPU and lead to other requests failing, causing other users to be denied service. This vulnerability is fixed…
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Medium 6.9
pypdf: Manipulated XMP metadata streams can exhaust RAM
pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library. Prior to 6.12.1, an attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to large memory usage. This requires parsing large XMP metadata, possibly with lots of unnecessary elements. This vul…
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Medium 6.8
Volcano: Webhook server vulnerable to OOM due to unbounded HTTP request body size
Volcano is a Kubernetes-native batch scheduling system. Prior to v1.14.2, v1.13.3, and v1.12.4, the Volcano webhook server does not enforce a size limit on incoming HTTP request bodies. Any in-cluster pod that can reach the webhook endpoint may send an arbitr…
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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 17.1 before 18.10.7, 18.11 before 18.11.4, and 19.0 before 19.0.1 that under certain conditions could have allowed an authenticated user to cause denial of service due to insufficient …
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Medium 5.5
IBM® Db2® is vulnerable to a denial of service when a specially crafted query is run with range partitioned tables
IBM Db2 11.5.0 through 11.5.9, and 12.1.0 through 12.1.4 is vulnerable to a denial of service when a specially crafted query is run with range partitioned tables.
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High 7.1
IBM® Db2® is vulnerable to a denial of service with a specially crafted query when running an AUTONOMOUS procedure
IBM Db2 11.5.0 through 11.5.9, and 12.1.0 through 12.1.4 is vulnerable to a denial of service with a specially crafted query when autonomous transactions are enabled.
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High 7.5
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in the OPC-UA Server
An Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in the OPC-UA Server used in PPT30 Operating System versions before 1.8.0 may be used by an unauthenticated network-based attacker to permanently prevent legitimate users from interacting w…
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High 8.7
Atom table exhaustion via unrecognized URL schemes in hackney
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in benoitc hackney allows Flooding. The URL parser in src/hackney_url.erl converts every unrecognized URL scheme to a permanent BEAM atom via binary_to_atom/2. BEAM atoms are never garbage-col…
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Medium 5.9
HP ENVY 5000 series printers VERBASPP1N003.2237A.00 do not properly manage concurrent TCP connections to port 9100 (Jet…
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Low 3.1
Unbounded realloc in charset conversion
An unbounded memory reallocation in the charset conversion code in Netatalk 2.0.0 through 4.4.2 allows a remote authenticated attacker to cause a minor denial of service via crafted character conversion requests.
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Medium 4.3
Allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability in Progress Software MOVEit Automation
Allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability in Progress Software MOVEit Automation allows Excessive Allocation. This issue affects MOVEit Automation: before 2025.0.11, from 2025.1.0 before 2025.1.7.
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Medium 5.3
Allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability in Progress Software MOVEit Automation
Allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability in Progress Software MOVEit Automation allows Flooding. This issue affects MOVEit Automation: before 2025.0.11, from 2025.1.0 before 2025.1.7.
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High 8.2
Unauthenticated denial-of-service via BEAM atom table exhaustion in phoenix_storybook
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in phenixdigital phoenix_storybook allows unauthenticated denial-of-service via BEAM atom table exhaustion. Multiple LiveView event handlers convert user-supplied event parameter strings to at…
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High 7.5
BIND 9 server memory exhaustion during GSS-API TKEY negotiation
BIND servers that are configured to use TKEY-based authentication via GSS-API tokens are vulnerable to excessive memory consumption when receiving and processing maliciously-constructed packets. Typically these servers will be found in Active Directory integr…
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Medium 6.6
Long list of incoming EDNS options degrades performance
NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 is vulnerable to a degradation of service attack related to parsing long lists of incoming EDNS options. An adversary sending queries with too many EDNS options can hold Unbound threads hostage while they …
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High 7.5
389-ds-base: 389-ds-base: unbounded ldap controls count in get_ldapmessage_controls_ext() causes cpu and heap amplification (remote dos)
A flaw was found in 389-ds-base. The get_ldapmessage_controls_ext() function in the LDAP server does not enforce an upper bound on the number of controls per LDAP message. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can send a specially crafted LDAP request containing…