Denial of Service Vulnerabilities

Resource exhaustion vulnerabilities in dependencies can bring down entire applications through carefully crafted inputs. Regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) represents a common pattern where certain inputs cause exponential processing time in regex evaluation. Many popular libraries for input validation or text processing contain ReDoS vulnerabilities. A single malicious request can consume 100% CPU for extended periods, effectively denying service to legitimate users.

Memory exhaustion attacks exploit vulnerabilities where components allocate unbounded memory based on user input. XML parsers suffering from billion laughs attacks, JSON parsers vulnerable to deeply nested structures, or image processing libraries that allocate memory based on header values all fall into this category. These vulnerabilities are particularly effective because they require minimal attacker resources while consuming significant server resources.

Algorithmic complexity attacks target inefficient algorithms in dependencies that exhibit poor performance with specific inputs. Hash collision attacks against predictable hash functions can degrade hash table performance from O(1) to O(n), causing severe performance degradation. These subtle vulnerabilities might not manifest under normal usage but can be triggered by attackers who understand the underlying algorithms.