Weakness · Medium
CWE-1177: Use of Prohibited Code
What it is
The product uses a function, library, or third party component that has been explicitly prohibited, whether by the developer or the customer.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
The developer - or customers - may wish to restrict or eliminate use of a function, library, or third party component for any number of reasons, including real or suspected vulnerabilities; difficulty to use securely; export controls or license requirements; obsolete or poorly-maintained code; internal code being scheduled for deprecation; etc. To reduce risk of vulnerabilities, the developer might maintain a list of "banned" functions that programmers must avoid using because the functions are difficult or impossible to use securely. This issue can also make the product more costly and difficult to maintain.
What an attacker can do
- Reduce Maintainability (Other)
How to prevent it
MITRE lists no specific mitigation for this weakness. Treat it like its parent weaknesses below: validate input, keep the design simple and review the code where it could appear.
How to find it
- Automated Static Analysis. Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.