CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Limited resources include memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. If an attacker can trigger the allocation of these limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the attacker could cause a denial of service that consumes all available resources. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as well as its host operating system.

There are at least three distinct scenarios which can commonly lead to resource exhaustion:

• Lack of throttling for the number of allocated resources
• Losing all references to a resource before reaching the shutdown stage
• Not closing/returning a resource after processing

Resource exhaustion problems are often result due to an incorrect implementation of the following situations:

• Error conditions and other exceptional circumstances.
• Confusion over which part of the program is responsible for releasing the resource.