Rate limits are implemented with e.g., token buckets which fill to a limit at a fixed rate. Timed tasks would then on run try to take a token, and if none is present wait for one. This would then be dutifully enforced regardless of the current state of scheduled tasks.
Only consideration for the timer itself would be to always add random jitter to avoid having peak loads coalesce.
Maybe not contrived but definitely insecure by definition. Allowing user control of rates is definitely useful & a power devs will need to grant but it should never be direct control.
No matter how many layers of abstraction you put in between, you're still eventually going to be passing a value to the setTimeout function that was computed based on something the user inputted, right?
If you're not aware of these caveats about extremely high timeout values, how do any layers of abstraction in between help you prevent this? As far as I can see, the only prevention is knowing about the caveats and specifically adding validation for them.
Or comes from a set of known values. This stuff isn't that difficult.
This doesn't require prescient knowledge of high timeout edge cases. It's generally accepted good security practice to limit business logic execution based on user input parameters. This goes beyond input validation & bounds on user input (both also good practice but most likely to just involve a !NaN check here), but more broadly user input is data & timeout values are code. Data should be treated differently by your app than code.
To generalise the case more, another common case of a user submitting a config value that would be used in logic would be string labels for categories. You could validate against a known list of categories (good but potentially expensive) but whether you do or not it's still good hygiene to key the user submitted string against a category hashmap or enum - this cleanly avoids using user input directly in your executing business logic.
although not the OP this is what I would mean by indirect control.
pseudo if userAccountType === "free" then rate = longRate
if userAccountType === "base" then rate = infrequentRate
if userAccountType === "important" then rate = frequentRate
obviously rate determination would probably be more complicated than just userAccountType
