7PK - Errors

A category in the Common Weakness Enumeration published by The MITRE Corporation.

  • Source

    CWE Catalog - 4.12

  • Identifier

    CWE-388

  • Status

    Draft

Contents

Summary

Categories in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) group entries based on some common characteristic or attribute.

This category represents one of the phyla in the Seven Pernicious Kingdoms vulnerability classification. It includes weaknesses that occur when an application does not properly handle errors that occur during processing. According to the authors of the Seven Pernicious Kingdoms, "Errors and error handling represent a class of API. Errors related to error handling are so common that they deserve a special kingdom of their own. As with 'API Abuse,' there are two ways to introduce an error-related security vulnerability: the most common one is handling errors poorly (or not at all). The second is producing errors that either give out too much information (to possible attackers) or are difficult to handle."

Weaknesses

Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception

Catching overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.

Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception

Throwing overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.

Unchecked Error Condition

[PLANNED FOR DEPRECATION. SEE MAINTENANCE NOTES AND CONSIDER CWE-252, CWE-248, OR CWE-1069.] Ignoring exceptions and other error conditions may allow an attacker to in...

Use of NullPointerException Catch to Detect NULL Pointer Dereference

Catching NullPointerException should not be used as an alternative to programmatic checks to prevent dereferencing a null pointer.

Concepts

Seven Pernicious Kingdoms

This view (graph) organizes weaknesses using a hierarchical structure that is similar to that used by Seven Pernicious Kingdoms.

See Also

  1. Seven Pernicious Kingdoms: A Taxonomy of Software Security Errors

    NIST Workshop on Software Security Assurance Tools Techniques and Metrics

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