The embodiments described herein provide systems and methods for recovering resources in processing devices. Specifically, the embodiments described herein provide techniques for recovering leaked resources allocated to hardware engines in a hardware processing core. As one example, the recovery of resources allocated to hardware engines can be facilitated by making a specified register available to monitoring software. When leaked or otherwise stuck resources are identified, the monitoring software can set the register to trigger the recovery of those resources. This recovery of resources can be then performed by stopping the execution of processes in the hardware engines, invalidating the resources previously allocated to the hardware engines, initializing the resources, and starting the handling of new processes in the hardware engines. This process effectively recovers those resources, and allows those hardware engines to quickly resume operations.