CWE-774: Allocation of File Descriptors or Handles… | Glexia
CWE-774 (Allocation of File Descriptors or Handles Without Limits or Throttling) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
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.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-774, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
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: Use resource-limiting settings provided by the operating system or environment. For example, when managing system resources in POSIX, setrlimit() can be used to set limits for certain types of resources, and getrlimit() can determine how many resources are available. However, these functions are not available on all operating systems. When the current levels get close to the maximum that is defined for the application (see CWE-770), then limit the allocation of further resources to privileged users; alternately, begin releasing resources for less-privileged users. While this mitigation may protect the system from attack, it will not necessarily stop attackers from adversely impacting other users. Ensure that the application performs the appropriate error checks and error handling in case resources become unavailable (CWE-703).
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.