Weakness · Medium

CWE-245: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Management of Connections

What it is

The J2EE application directly manages connections, instead of using the container's connection management facilities.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

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 J2EE standard forbids the direct management of connections. It requires that applications use the container's resource management facilities to obtain connections to resources. Every major web application container provides pooled database connection management as part of its resource management framework. Duplicating this functionality in an application is difficult and error prone, which is part of the reason it is forbidden under the J2EE standard.

What an attacker can do

  • Quality Degradation (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.)

CWE-245 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.