CWE-1325

Base Abstraction Level
Pillar — Highest-level weakness category
Class — Abstract, language-independent
Base — Specific enough to detect
Variant — Tied to specific technology
Compound — Requires multiple weaknesses Incomplete MITRE CWE Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development, may change
Incomplete — Partially defined by MITRE
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CWE
Improperly Controlled Sequential Memory Allocation

Description

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.

Consequences

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.

Mitigations

Phase: 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.

Phase: 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.