Improperly Controlled Sequential Memory Allocation

Opis

The product manages a group of objects or resources and performs a separate memory allocation for each object, but it does not properly limit the total amount of memory that is consumed by all of the combined objects.

While the product might limit the amount of memory that is allocated in a single operation for a single object (such as a malloc of an array), if an attacker can cause multiple objects to be allocated in separate operations, then this might cause higher total memory consumption than the developer intended, leading to a denial of service.

Inne nazwy

Stack Exhaustion

When a weakness allocates excessive memory on the stack, it is often described as "stack exhaustion," which is a technical impact of the weakness. This technical impact is often encountered as a consequence of CWE-789 and/or CWE-1325.

Skutki

• Availability

  DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)

  Not controlling memory allocation can result in a request for too much system memory, possibly leading to a crash of the application due to out-of-memory conditions, or the consumption of a large amount of memory on the system.

Zapobieganie

• Implementation

  Ensure multiple allocations of the same kind of object are properly tracked - possibly across multiple sessions, requests, or messages. Define an appropriate strategy for handling requests that exceed the limit, and consider supporting a configuration option so that the administrator can extend the amount of memory to be used if necessary.

• Operation

  Run the program using system-provided resource limits for memory. This might still cause the program to crash or exit, but the impact to the rest of the system will be minimized.

Przykłady podatności

• CVE-2020-36049 JavaScript-based packet decoder uses concatenation of many small strings, causing out-of-memory (OOM) condition
• CVE-2019-20176 Product allocates a new buffer on the stack for each file in a directory, allowing stack exhaustion
• CVE-2013-1591 Chain: an integer overflow (CWE-190) in the image size calculation causes an infinite loop (CWE-835) which sequentially allocates buffers without limits (CWE-1325) until the stack is full.

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Pokrewna

• CWE-789 Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value

Może prowadzić do

• CWE-476 NULL Pointer Dereference

Kiedy powstaje

• Implementation

Dotyczy

C, C++, Not Language-Specific