The product does not properly maintain a reference to a resource that has been allocated, which prevents the resource from being reclaimed.
This does not necessarily apply in languages or frameworks that automatically perform garbage collection, since the removal of all references may act as a signal that the resource is ready to be reclaimed.
Use resource-limiting settings provided by the operating system or environment. For example, when managing system resources in POSIX, setrlimit() can be used to set limits for certain types of resources, and getrlimit() can determine how many resources are available. However, these functions are not available on all operating systems.
When the current levels get close to the maximum that is defined for the application (see CWE-770), then limit the allocation of further resources to privileged u...
An attacker that can influence the allocation of resources that are not properly maintained could deplete the available resource pool and prevent all other processes from accessing the same type of resource.
Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)