Excessive Iteration

Opis

The product performs an iteration or loop without sufficiently limiting the number of times that the loop is executed.

If the iteration can be influenced by an attacker, this weakness could allow attackers to consume excessive resources such as CPU or memory. In many cases, a loop does not need to be infinite in order to cause enough resource consumption to adversely affect the product or its host system; it depends on the amount of resources consumed per iteration.

Skutki

• Availability

  DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory); DoS: Amplification; DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

  Excessive looping will cause unexpected consumption of resources, such as CPU cycles or memory. The product's operation may slow down, or cause a long time to respond. If limited resources such as memory are consumed for each iteration, the loop may eventually cause a crash or program exit due to exhaustion of resources, such as an out-of-memory error.

Przykłady podatności

• CVE-2011-1027 Chain: off-by-one error (CWE-193) leads to infinite loop (CWE-835) using invalid hex-encoded characters.
• CVE-2006-6499 Chain: web browser crashes due to infinite loop - "bad looping logic [that relies on] floating point math [CWE-1339] to exit the loop [CWE-835]"

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-691 Insufficient Control Flow Management

Słabości podrzędne

• CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion
• CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop')
• CWE-1322 Use of Blocking Code in Single-threaded, Non-blocking Context

Kiedy powstaje

• Implementation

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific, Not Technology-Specific

Źródła

1. The Art of Software Security Assessment — Mark Dowd, John McDonald, Justin Schuh, Chapter 7, "Looping Constructs", Page 327, Addison Wesley, 2006
2. State-of-the-Art Resources (SOAR) for Software Vulnerability Detection, Test, and Evaluation — Gregory Larsen, E. Kenneth Hong Fong, David A. Wheeler, Rama S. Moorthy, 2014