Uncontrolled Recursion
The product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.
Demonstrations
The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.
Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.
Example One
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.
void do_something_recursive (int flg)
{
... // Do some real work here, but the value of flg is unmodified
if (flg) { do_something_recursive (flg); } // flg is never modified so it is always TRUE - this call will continue until the stack explodes
}
int flag = 1; // Set to TRUE
do_something_recursive (flag);Note that the only difference between the Good and Bad examples is that the recursion flag will change value and cause the recursive call to return.
void do_something_recursive (int flg)
{
... // Do some real work here
// Modify value of flg on done condition
if (flg) { do_something_recursive (flg); } // returns when flg changes to 0
}
int flag = 1; // Set to TRUE
do_something_recursive (flag);See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to insufficient control flow management.
Weaknesses in this category are related to the CISQ Quality Measures for Reliability, as documented in 2016 with the Automated Source Code CISQ Reliability Measure (AS...
This category identifies Software Fault Patterns (SFPs) within the Unrestricted Consumption cluster (SFP13).
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
CWE entries in this view (graph) may be used to categorize potential weaknesses within sources that handle public, third-party vulnerability information, such as the N...
This view contains a selection of weaknesses that represent the variety of weaknesses that are captured in CWE, at a level of abstraction that is likely to be useful t...
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