Incorrect Check of Function Return Value
The product incorrectly checks a return value from a function, which prevents it from detecting errors or exceptional conditions.
Description
Important and common functions will return some value about the success of its actions. This will alert the program whether or not to handle any errors caused by that function.
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
This code attempts to allocate memory for 4 integers and checks if the allocation succeeds.
tmp = malloc(sizeof(int) * 4);
if (tmp < 0 ) {
perror("Failure");
//should have checked if the call returned 0
}The code assumes that only a negative return value would indicate an error, but malloc() may return a null pointer when there is an error. The value of tmp could then be equal to 0, and the error would be missed.
See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to poor coding practices.
Weaknesses in this category are related to the rules and recommendations in the POSIX (POS) section of the SEI CERT C Coding Standard.
Weaknesses in this category are related to the rules and recommendations in the Error Handling (ERR) section of the SEI CERT C Coding Standard.
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
This view contains a selection of weaknesses that represent the variety of weaknesses that are captured in CWE, at a level of abstraction that is likely to be useful t...
This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during implementation.
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