Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Description

This is often triggered by improper handling of malformed data or unexpectedly interrupted sessions. In some languages, developers are responsible for tracking memory allocation and releasing the memory. If there are no more pointers or references to the memory, then it can no longer be tracked and identified for release.

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

The following C function leaks a block of allocated memory if the call to read() does not return the expected number of bytes:

char* getBlock(int fd) {

  char* buf = (char*) malloc(BLOCK_SIZE);
  if (!buf) {
    return NULL;
  }
  if (read(fd, buf, BLOCK_SIZE) != BLOCK_SIZE) {


    return NULL;

  }
  return buf;

}

See Also