Weakness · Medium
CWE-410: Insufficient Resource Pool
What it is
The product's resource pool is not large enough to handle peak demand, which allows an attacker to prevent others from accessing the resource by using a (relatively) large number of requests for resources.
- 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
Frequently the consequence is a "flood" of connection or sessions.
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability, Integrity, Other)
- Other (Availability, Integrity, Other)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Do not perform resource-intensive transactions for unauthenticated users and/or invalid requests.
- Consider implementing a velocity check mechanism which would detect abusive behavior.
- Identify the system's resource intensive operations and consider protecting them from abuse (e.g. malicious automated script which runs the resources out).
Operation
- Consider load balancing as an option to handle heavy loads.
Implementation
- Make sure that resource handles are properly closed when no longer needed.
H2 Security
Found it in your code?
We review where it appears, fix it with your team, and check it was not already used against you.
Talk to our teamT Academy
Stop writing it in the first place
Learn to build software and systems without weaknesses like this one, with practice on real hosts in your browser, every objective checked on the machine.
Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.