Fix Unrestricted Resource Consumption in AdonisJS

Unrestricted resource consumption in AdonisJS is a fast track to a Denial of Service (DoS). By default, loose body parser configurations and missing rate limits allow attackers to flood your heap or saturate disk I/O. As a researcher, my goal is to ensure the application fails gracefully under pressure rather than crashing the entire node process due to memory exhaustion or disk filling.

The Vulnerable Pattern

// config/bodyparser.ts - Dangerous oversized limits
export const bodyParserConfig = {
  json: {
    limit: '100mb', // Attacker can flood RAM with massive JSON strings
  },
  multipart: {
    autoProcess: true,
    maxSize: '5gb', // Easy disk exhaustion attack vector
  }
}
// Controller - Processing data without any throttling
public async store({ request }: HttpContext) {
const data = request.all();
await Database.table(‘logs’).insert(data);
return { status: ‘ok’ };
}

The Secure Implementation

The mitigation strategy focuses on 'Defense in Depth'. First, we harden the global body parser settings in config/bodyparser.ts to reject massive payloads before they hit the application logic, preventing memory exhaustion. Second, we implement the @adonisjs/limiter package to throttle the number of requests a single client can make, preventing CPU and database connection saturation. Finally, we move from generic request handling to strict schema-based validation to ensure that only expected, small-footprint data is processed by the event loop.

// 1. config/bodyparser.ts - Strict payload capping
export const bodyParserConfig = {
  json: { limit: '1mb' },
  multipart: {
    autoProcess: true,
    maxSize: '2mb', 
    extnames: ['jpg', 'png']
  }
}
// 2. start/limiter.ts - Implementing Rate Limiting
import Limiter from ‘@ioc:Adonis/Addons/Limiter’
export const { http } = Limiter.define(‘global’, ({ auth }) => {
return Limiter.allowRequests(100).every(‘1 min’).usingKey(auth.user?.id || ‘guest’)
})
// 3. start/kernel.ts - Registering the middleware
Server.middleware.register([
() => import(‘@ioc:Adonis/Addons/LimiterMiddleware’)
])

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The Vulnerable Pattern

The Secure Implementation

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Verified by Ghost Labs Security Team