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CWE WEAKNESSES  /  CWE-834

CWE-834

Excessive Iteration

Class

What it is

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

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.

Impact

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

Real-world CVE examples

  • CVE-2011-1027 — Chain: off-by-one error (CWE-193) leads to infinite loop (CWE-835) using invalid hex-encoded characters.
  • CVE-2006-6499 — Chain: web browser crashes due to infinite loop - "bad looping logic [that relies on] floating point math [CWE-1339] to exit the loop [CWE-835]"

Related weaknesses

Test & detect

Browse all common weaknesses, check related exploited CVEs, or map to ATT&CK techniques.

Source: MITRE CWE. View on cwe.mitre.org →

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