Function Call with Incorrectly Specified Arguments

Description

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 PHP method authenticates a user given a username/password combination but is called with the parameters in reverse order.

function authenticate($username, $password) {


  // authenticate user
  ...

}

authenticate($_POST['password'], $_POST['username']);

Example Two

This Perl code intends to record whether a user authenticated successfully or not, and to exit if the user fails to authenticate. However, when it calls ReportAuth(), the third argument is specified as 0 instead of 1, so it does not exit.

sub ReportAuth {
  my ($username, $result, $fatal) = @_;
  PrintLog("auth: username=%s, result=%d", $username, $result);
  if (($result ne "success") && $fatal) {
    die "Failed!\n";
  }
}

sub PrivilegedFunc
{
  my $result = CheckAuth($username);
  ReportAuth($username, $result, 0);
  DoReallyImportantStuff();
}

Example Three

In the following Java snippet, the accessGranted() method is accidentally called with the static ADMIN_ROLES array rather than the user roles.

private static final String[] ADMIN_ROLES = ...;
public boolean void accessGranted(String resource, String user) {
  String[] userRoles = getUserRoles(user);
  return accessGranted(resource, ADMIN_ROLES);
}

private boolean void accessGranted(String resource, String[] userRoles) {


  // grant or deny access based on user roles
  ...

}

See Also