CWE-774: Allocation of File Descriptors or Handles Without Limits or Throttling
Official CWE-774 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-774: File Descriptor Exhaustion
Allocation of File Descriptors or Handles Without Limits or Throttling represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Resource Consumption (Other): When allocating resources without limits, an attacker could prevent all other processes from accessing the same type of resource.
Developer Pattern
CWE-774 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-774, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-774: Allocation of File Descriptors or Handles Without Limits or Throttling
The product allocates file descriptors or handles on behalf of an actor without imposing any restrictions on how many descriptors can be allocated, in violation of the intended security policy for that actor.
This can cause the product to consume all available file descriptors or handles, which can prevent other processes from performing critical file processing operations.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Operation,Architecture and Design: [object Object]
Detection
- 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.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.