COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-834

Excessive Iteration

The product performs an iteration or loop without sufficiently limiting the number of times that the loop is executed.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product performs an iteration or loop without sufficiently limiting the number of times that the loop is executed.

Extended description

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

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)DoS: AmplificationDoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

Affected security scopes: Availability

Excessive looping will cause unexpected consumption of resources, such as CPU cycles or memory. The product'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.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

  • Follow secure coding guidelines for input handling and boundary checking.
  • Enforce strict security reviews and automated static analysis (SAST) checks.

Verification

How is it detected?

Dynamic Analysis with Manual Results Interpretation

SOAR Partial
According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: ``` Cost effective for partial coverage: ``` Fuzz Tester Framework-based Fuzzer Forced Path Execution

Manual Static Analysis - Source Code

SOAR Partial
According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: ``` Cost effective for partial coverage: ``` Focused Manual Spotcheck - Focused manual analysis of source Manual Source Code Review (not inspections)

Automated Static Analysis - Source Code

High
According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: ``` Highly cost effective: ``` Context-configured Source Code Weakness Analyzer

Architecture or Design Review

High
According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: ``` Highly cost effective: ``` Inspection (IEEE 1028 standard) (can apply to requirements, design, source code, etc.)