Description

The software 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 software or its host system; it depends on the amount of resources consumed per iteration.

Modes of Introduction:

Likelihood of Exploit:

Related Weaknesses

CWE-691

Consequences

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 software’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.

Potential Mitigations

CVE References

• CVE-2011-1027
  • Chain: off-by-one error leads to infinite loop 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]”