Insufficient Encapsulation of Machine-Dependent Functionality
The product or code uses machine-dependent functionality, but it does not sufficiently encapsulate or isolate this functionality from the rest of the code.
Description
This issue makes it more difficult to port or maintain the product, which indirectly affects security by making it more difficult or time-consuming to find and/or fix vulnerabilities. It also might make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities.
Demonstrations
The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.
Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.
Example One
In this example function, the memory address of variable b is derived by adding 1 to the address of variable a. This derived address is then used to assign the value 0 to b.
void example() {
char a;
char b;
*(&a + 1) = 0;
}Here, b may not be one byte past a. It may be one byte in front of a. Or, they may have three bytes between them because they are aligned on 32-bit boundaries.
See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to poor coding practices.
Weaknesses in this category are related to issues surrounding the bundling of data with the methods intended to operate on that data.
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