Weakness · High
CWE-192: Integer Coercion Error
What it is
Integer coercion refers to a set of flaws pertaining to the type casting, extension, or truncation of primitive data types.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- Medium
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Several flaws fall under the category of integer coercion errors. For the most part, these errors in and of themselves result only in availability and data integrity issues. However, in some circumstances, they may result in other, more complicated security related flaws, such as buffer overflow conditions.
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU) (Availability)
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory) (Availability)
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability)
- Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability)
- Other (Integrity, Other)
How to prevent it
Requirements
- A language which throws exceptions on ambiguous data casts might be chosen.
Architecture and Design
- Design objects and program flow such that multiple or complex casts are unnecessary
Implementation
- Ensure that any data type casting that you must used is entirely understood in order to reduce the plausibility of error in use.
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.)
H2 Security
Found it in your code?
We review where it appears, fix it with your team, and check it was not already used against you.
Talk to our teamT Academy
Stop writing it in the first place
Learn to build software and systems without weaknesses like this one, with practice on real hosts in your browser, every objective checked on the machine.
Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.