Fix for CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

[asadeddin]

Corgea is an AI security engineer that fixes vulnerable code.

It issued this PR to fix a vulnerability for you to review.

See the issue and fix in Corgea.

Explanation of the issue

CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource, thereby enabling an actor to influence the amount of resources consumed, eventually leading to the exhaustion of available resources.

Limited resources include memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. If an attacker can trigger the allocation of these limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the attacker could cause a denial of service that consumes all available resources. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as well as its host operating system.
There are at least three distinct scenarios which can commonly lead to resource exhaustion:

Lack of throttling for the number of allocated resources
Losing all references to a resource before reaching the shutdown stage
Not closing/returning a resource after processing

Resource exhaustion problems are often result due to an incorrect implementation of the following situations:

Error conditions and other exceptional circumstances.
Confusion over which part of the program is responsible for releasing the resource.

Explanation of the fix

The security fix involves implementing throttling in the REST framework to control resource allocation and prevent uncontrolled resource consumption that could lead to a denial of service.

• The fix introduces two types of throttling classes: 'AnonRateThrottle' and 'UserRateThrottle'. These classes limit the number of requests that can be made by anonymous and authenticated users respectively.
• The 'DEFAULT_THROTTLE_RATES' setting is used to specify the rate of requests. In this case, anonymous users are limited to 100 requests per hour, while authenticated users are limited to 1000 requests per hour.
• By implementing these throttling measures, the application can effectively control the allocation of resources, preventing an attacker from exhausting them and causing a denial of service.