CAPEC-130
Excessive Allocation
An adversary causes the target to allocate excessive resources to servicing the attackers' request, thereby reducing the resources available for legitimate services and degrading or denying services. Usually, this attack focuses on memory allocation, but any finite resource on the target could be the attacked, including bandwidth, processing cycles, or other resources. This attack does not attempt to force this allocation through a large number of requests (that would be Resource Depletion through Flooding) but instead uses one or a small number of requests that are carefully formatted to force the target to allocate excessive resources to service this request(s). Often this attack takes advantage of a bug in the target to cause the target to allocate resources vastly beyond what would be needed for a normal request.
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Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-130: Excessive Allocation: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/130.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/130?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.
Prerequisites
The target must accept service requests from the attacker and the adversary must be able to control the resource allocation associated with this request to be in excess of the normal allocation. The latter is usually accomplished through the presence of a bug on the target that allows the adversary to manipulate variables used in the allocation.
Resources required
None: No specialized resources are required to execute this type of attack.
Consequences
| Impact | Affects | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Resource Consumption | Availability | A successful excessive allocation attack forces the target system to exhaust its resources, thereby compromising the availability of its service. |
Mitigations
Limit the amount of resources that are accessible to unprivileged users.
Assume all input is malicious. Consider all potentially relevant properties when validating input.
Consider uniformly throttling all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Use resource-limiting settings, if possible.
Weaknesses it exploits
- CWE-404 Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
- CWE-1325 Improperly Controlled Sequential Memory Allocation
Recent CVEs with these weaknesses
- –CVE-2026-86531
The embedded OpenEJB HTTP server does not limit the size of incoming request bodies or of multipart requests, and does not remove the temporary files it creates for multipart parts. A remote unauthenticated attacker can cause excessive mem…
- 7.0CVE-2026-114359
Eclipse Kura downloads deployment packages (DPs) from a remote URL without any limit on the size of the data it receives. A malicious or compromised HTTP(S) server, or an attacker able to tamper with a plain-HTTP download, can stream an ar…
- 8.7CVE-2026-60040
An unauthenticated remote attacker can perform a DoS in the backends backup creation function. This can result in a total loss of availability.
- 8.7CVE-2026-123817
AIOHTTP is an asynchronous HTTP client/server framework for asyncio and Python. Prior to 3.14.4, the WebSocket reader retains one bytes object for each transport read while reassembling an incomplete frame. A malicious peer can split a fra…
- 6.8CVE-2026-125205
FFmpeg through 9.0.2 contains an unbounded memory allocation vulnerability in the av1_frame_merge bitstream filter that allows attackers to exhaust memory by never sending a temporal delimiter OBU. Attackers can supply a crafted .obu file …
- 5.7CVE-2026-125186
FFmpeg through 9.0.2 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in the dts2pts bitstream filter that allows attackers to exhaust CPU through unbounded per-packet POC node allocation. Attackers can supply a crafted H.264 pa…
- 6.8CVE-2026-125180
FFmpeg 8.1 through 9.0.2 contains a memory exhaustion vulnerability in the libavcodec/exif.c parser that allows attackers to amplify allocations by pointing many IFD entries at overlapping payloads. Attackers can embed a small crafted EXIF…
- 7.5CVE-2026-112322
clean_client() in lib/rpc/svc_auth_gssapi.c in MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) restarts its scan from the head of the client list after each removal, resulting in quadratic CPU cost. Remote attackers can cause a denial of service (CPU consumptio…
The newest records naming one of them. Each weakness's page lists them all.
Related attack patterns
Examples
In an Integer Attack, the adversary could cause a variable that controls allocation for a request to hold an …
In an Integer Attack, the adversary could cause a variable that controls allocation for a request to hold an excessively large value. Excessive allocation of resources can render a service degraded or unavailable to legitimate users and can even lead to crashing of the target.
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