CWE-674—Uncontrolled Recursion

Weakness Name

Uncontrolled Recursion

Description

The product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.

Common Consequences

Scope:

Availability

Impact:

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

Notes:

Resources including CPU, memory, and stack memory could be rapidly consumed or exhausted, eventually leading to an exit or crash.

Scope:

Confidentiality

Impact:

Read Application Data

Notes:

In some cases, an application's interpreter might kill a process or thread that appears to be consuming too much resources, such as with PHP's memory_limit setting. When the interpreter kills the process/thread, it might report an error containing detailed information such as the application's installation path.

Related Weaknesses

• CWE-834Excessive Iteration