CAPEC-130: Excessive Allocation

Description

An adversary causes the target to allocate excessive resources to servicing the attackers' request, thereby reducing the resources available for legitimate services and degrading or denying services. Usually, this attack focuses on memory allocation, but any finite resource on the target could be the attacked, including bandwidth, processing cycles, or other resources. This attack does not attempt to force this allocation through a large number of requests (that would be Resource Depletion through Flooding) but instead uses one or a small number of requests that are carefully formatted to force the target to allocate excessive resources to service this request(s). Often this attack takes advantage of a bug in the target to cause the target to allocate resources vastly beyond what would be needed for a normal request.

Extended Description

If access control mechanisms are absent or misconfigured, a user may be able to access resources that are intended only for higher level users. An adversary may be able to exploit this to utilize a less trusted account to gain information and perform activities reserved for more trusted accounts.

This attack differs from privilege escalation and other privilege stealing attacks in that the adversary never actually escalates their privileges but instead is able to use a lesser degree of privilege to access resources that should be (but are not) reserved for higher privilege accounts. Likewise, the adversary does not exploit trust or subvert systems - all control functionality is working as configured but the configuration does not adequately protect sensitive resources at an appropriate level.

Severity :

Medium

Possibility :

Medium

Type :

Relationships with other CAPECs

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

CAPEC-230: Serialized Data with Nested Payloads Serialized Data with Nested Payloads CAPEC-231: Oversized Serialized Data Payloads Oversized Serialized Data Payloads CAPEC-492: Regular Expression Exponential Blowup Regular Expression Exponential Blowup CAPEC-493: SOAP Array Blowup SOAP Array Blowup CAPEC-494: TCP Fragmentation TCP Fragmentation CAPEC-495: UDP Fragmentation UDP Fragmentation CAPEC-496: ICMP Fragmentation ICMP Fragmentation

Prerequisites

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

The target must accept service requests from the attacker and the adversary must be able to control the resource allocation associated with this request to be in excess of the normal allocation. The latter is usually accomplished through the presence of a bug on the target that allows the adversary to manipulate variables used in the allocation.

Skills required

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

ATTACK | Endpoint Denial of Service:Application Exhaustion Flood WASC | Denial of Service

Resources required

None: No specialized resources are required to execute this type of attack.

Related CWE

A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful.

CWE-404: Improper Resource Shutdown or Release

CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

CWE-1325: Improperly Controlled Sequential Memory Allocation

Visit http://capec.mitre.org/ for more details.