CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Consequences

• Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory), DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
• Access Control, Other: Bypass Protection Mechanism, Other

How to prevent it

• 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.
• 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.
• Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
• Implementation: Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.

Recent advisories

• GHSA-cggf-277g-3q54 — pypdf has possible large memory usage when parsing page tree
• GHSA-3g3m-2fjr-6pw4 — Glob: AbortSignal cancellation bypass allows post-timeout filesystem traversal
• GHSA-42gh-23hr-vphw — pypdf has possible long runtimes when retrieving page labels
• GHSA-4vqv-7265-gm2w — pypdf has possible large memory usage for exceptions in strict mode
• GHSA-62m5-6wh8-28x7 — pypdf has possible long runtimes/large memory usage for encrypted PDF files
• GHSA-7wch-p9px-956x — Forge: Regular expression denial of service in PEM decoding (pem.decode)
• GHSA-fw5c-8223-6h42 — russh: peer-declared zero maximum packet size permanently stalls channel writes (silent AsyncWrite hang)
• GHSA-x3rh-gjgm-fmqc — pypdf has possible large memory usage when parsing cross-reference streams
• GHSA-q7v9-x93c-xqv3 — zip: Unbounded Symlink-Target Handling Can Abort Or Exhaust Memory During Extraction
• GHSA-8vfg-2r28-hvhj — Crass: Non-ASCII characters cause superlinear CPU consumption
• GHSA-6jxj-px6v-747w — Crass: Deeply nested CSS blocks and functions can trigger a SystemStackError or excessive memory usage
• GHSA-cwqr-hh33-gh44 — filelock ReadWriteLock: a crafted lock database makes every acquire stall or hang regardless of timeout
• GHSA-x567-49g5-p4cf — vLLM: Responses API bypasses trust_request_chat_template for chat_template_kwargs
• GHSA-542m-9234-8gvf — vLLM: DoS via unbounded chat_template Jinja2 rendering exhausts the renderer thread pool
• GHSA-9hj8-73fh-9963 — zip: legacy Shrink/Reduce/Implode decoder: denial of service from attacker-controlled ZIP64 uncompressed size

All advisories for CWE-400