Description

The program contains an iteration or loop with an exit condition that cannot be reached, i.e., an infinite loop.

If the loop can be influenced by an attacker, this weakness could allow attackers to consume excessive resources such as CPU or memory.

Modes of Introduction:

Likelihood of Exploit:

Related Weaknesses

CWE-834
CWE-834

Consequences

Availability: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory), DoS: Amplification

An infinite loop 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.

Potential Mitigations

CVE References

• CVE-2011-1027
  • Chain: off-by-one error leads to infinite loop using invalid hex-encoded characters.

• CVE-2011-1142
  • Chain: self-referential values in recursive definitions lead to infinite loop.

• CVE-2011-1002
  • NULL UDP packet is never cleared from a queue, leading to infinite loop.

• 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]”

• CVE-2010-4476
  • Floating point conversion routine cycles back and forth between two different values.

• CVE-2010-4645
  • Floating point conversion routine cycles back and forth between two different values.

• CVE-2010-2534
  • Chain: improperly clearing a pointer in a linked list leads to infinite loop.

• CVE-2013-1591
  • Chain: an integer overflow (CWE-190) in the image size calculation causes an infinite loop (CWE-835) which sequentially allocates buffers without limits (CWE-1325) until the stack is full.

• CVE-2008-3688
  • Chain: A denial of service may be caused by an uninitialized variable (CWE-457) allowing an infinite loop (CWE-835) resulting from a connection to an unresponsive server.