Error Conditions, Return Values, Status Codes
A category in the Common Weakness Enumeration published by The MITRE Corporation.
Summary
Categories in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) group entries based on some common characteristic or attribute.
This category includes weaknesses that occur if a function does not generate the correct return/status code, or if the application does not handle all possible return/status codes that could be generated by a function. This type of problem is most often found in conditions that are rarely encountered during the normal operation of the product. Presumably, most bugs related to common conditions are found and eliminated during development and testing. In some cases, the attacker can directly control or influence the environment to trigger the rare conditions.
Weaknesses
Catching overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.
Throwing overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.
The product detects a specific error, but takes no actions to handle the error.
The product generates an error message that includes sensitive information about its environment, users, or associated data.
The product incorrectly checks a return value from a function, which prevents it from detecting errors or exceptional conditions.
The product does not return custom error pages to the user, possibly exposing sensitive information.
The product encounters an error but does not provide a status code or return value to indicate that an error has occurred.
The product does not use a standardized method for handling errors throughout the code, which might introduce inconsistent error handling and resultant weaknesses.
The product contains an assert() or similar statement that can be triggered by an attacker, which leads to an application exit or other behavior that is more severe th...
The code has a return statement inside a finally block, which will cause any thrown exception in the try block to be discarded.
A function or operation returns an incorrect return value or status code that does not indicate an error, but causes the product to modify its behavior based on the in...
An exception is thrown from a function, but it is not caught.
[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...
The product does not check the return value from a method or function, which can prevent it from detecting unexpected states and conditions.
The product does not properly check when a function or operation returns a value that is legitimate for the function, but is not expected by the product.
Catching NullPointerException should not be used as an alternative to programmatic checks to prevent dereferencing a null pointer.
Concepts
This view organizes weaknesses around concepts that are frequently used or encountered in software development. This includes all aspects of the software development l...
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