Weakness · High
CWE-128: Wrap-around Error
What it is
Wrap around errors occur whenever a value is incremented past the maximum value for its type and therefore "wraps around" to a very small, negative, or undefined value.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- Medium
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU) (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory) (Availability)
- DoS: Instability (Availability)
- Modify Memory (Integrity)
- Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands (Confidentiality, Availability, Access Control)
- Bypass Protection Mechanism (Confidentiality, Availability, Access Control)
How to prevent it
General
- Requirements specification: The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
Architecture and Design
- Provide clear upper and lower bounds on the scale of any protocols designed.
Implementation
- Perform validation on all incremented variables to ensure that they remain within reasonable bounds.
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.