Weakness · Medium

CWE-1229: Creation of Emergent Resource

What it is

The product manages resources or behaves in a way that indirectly creates a new, distinct resource that can be used by attackers in violation of the intended policy.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
Medium
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Architecture and Design, Implementation
Exploited in the wild
No CVE in CISA's catalog

In more detail

A product is only expected to behave in a way that was specifically intended by the developer. Resource allocation and management is expected to be performed explicitly by the associated code. However, in systems with complex behavior, the product might indirectly produce new kinds of resources that were never intended in the original design. For example, a covert channel is a resource that was never explicitly intended by the developer, but it is useful to attackers. "Parasitic computing," while not necessarily malicious in nature, effectively tricks a product into performing unintended computations on behalf of another party.

What an attacker can do

  • Varies by Context (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.

CWE-1229 on MITRE's CWE site

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.