Weakness · Medium
CWE-674: Uncontrolled Recursion
What it is
The product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU) (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory) (Availability)
- Read Application Data (Confidentiality)
How to prevent it
Implementation
- Ensure an end condition will be reached under all logic conditions. The end condition may include testing against the depth of recursion and exiting with an error if the recursion goes too deep. The complexity of the end condition contributes to the effectiveness of this action.
- Increase the stack size.
How to find it
- Automated Static Analysis. Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.