Excessive Iteration
This vulnerability occurs when a program runs a loop too many times because it lacks proper limits on its iterations.
When an attacker can control or influence the loop's conditions, they can force it to run far more times than intended. This quickly drains system resources like CPU cycles and memory, potentially causing slowdowns, service denial, or crashes. Even a loop that isn't technically infinite can be dangerous if each pass consumes significant resources. For developers, the core issue is trusting unvalidated input to control loop counters or termination logic. To prevent this, always enforce explicit, reasonable upper bounds on all iterative processes, especially those influenced by external data like user input, file contents, or network responses.
Impact: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)DoS: AmplificationDoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
Excessive looping will cause unexpected consumption of resources, such as CPU cycles or memory. The product's operation may slow down, or cause a long time to respond. If limited resources such as memory are consumed for each iteration, the loop may eventually cause a crash or program exit due to exhaustion of resources, such as an out-of-memory error.
ID : DX-204
In this example a mistake exists in the code where the exit condition contained in flg is never called. This results in the function calling itself over and over again until the stack is exhausted.Code Example:
void do_something_recursive (int flg) {
cCode Example:
void do_something_recursive (int flg) {
cID : DX-205
For this example, the method isReorderNeeded is part of a bookstore application that determines if a particular book needs to be reordered based on the current inventory count and the rate at which the book is being sold.Code Example:
java// get inventory count for book* int inventoryCount = inventory.getIventoryCount(bookISBN);
javajavaCode Example:
java// validate rateSold variable* if (rateSold < 1) { ``` return isReorder; } ... }