ABSTRACT

The program can potentially fail to release a system resource.

EXPLANATION

The program can potentially fail to release a system resource.

Resource leaks have at least two common causes:

- Error conditions and other exceptional circumstances.

- Confusion over which part of the program is responsible for releasing the resource.

Most unreleased resource issues result in general software reliability problems, but if an attacker can intentionally trigger a resource leak, the attacker might be able to launch a denial of service by depleting the resource pool.

Example: The following function does not close the file handle it opens. If the process is long-lived, it may run out of file handles.


BEGIN
...
F1 := UTL_FILE.FOPEN('user_dir','u12345.tmp','R',256);
UTL_FILE.GET_LINE(F1,V1,32767);
...
END;

REFERENCES

[1] Standards Mapping - OWASP Top 10 2004 - (OWASP 2004) A9 Application Denial of Service

[2] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3 - (STIG 3) APP6080 CAT II

[3] Standards Mapping - Common Weakness Enumeration - (CWE) CWE ID 404

[4] Standards Mapping - Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Version 1.1 - (PCI 1.1) Requirement 6.5.9

[5] Standards Mapping - SANS Top 25 2009 - (SANS 2009) Risky Resource Management - CWE ID 404