OWASP Top 10 for LLMs
LLM10

Unbounded Consumption

Token floods and recursive generation drive cost, latency, and denial-of-service.

LLM inference is expensive. Without limits, attackers can coerce extremely long or recursive generations, flood endpoints with requests, or extract model behavior at scale — causing denial-of-service, denial-of-wallet, and model theft.

How it shows up

  • Crafted inputs coerce a model into extremely long or recursive output.
  • High-volume querying drives runaway cost on a metered API.
  • Systematic probing extracts enough behavior to clone a model.

Mitigations

  • Rate-limit and quota requests per user and per key.
  • Cap output length and detect recursive or runaway generation.
  • Budget and alert on spend; apply anomaly detection.
  • Throttle and monitor to deter model-extraction attacks.

Related threats