Weakness · Medium

CWE-405: Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification)

What it is

The product does not properly control situations in which an adversary can cause the product to consume or produce excessive resources without requiring the adversary to invest equivalent work or otherwise prove authorization, i.e., the adversary's influence is "asymmetric."

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
Medium
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild
No CVE in CISA's catalog

In more detail

This can lead to poor performance due to "amplification" of resource consumption, typically in a non-linear fashion. This situation is worsened if the product allows malicious users or attackers to consume more resources than their access level permits.

What an attacker can do

  • DoS: Amplification (Availability)
  • DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU) (Availability)
  • DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory) (Availability)
  • DoS: Resource Consumption (Other) (Availability)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

  • An application must make resources available to a client commensurate with the client's access level.
  • An application must, at all times, keep track of allocated resources and meter their usage appropriately.

System Configuration

  • Consider disabling resource-intensive algorithms on the server side, such as Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

CWE-405 on MITRE's CWE site

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.