Weakness · Medium
CWE-253: Incorrect Check of Function Return Value
What it is
The product incorrectly checks a return value from a function, which prevents it from detecting errors or exceptional conditions.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Low
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Important and common functions will return some value about the success of its actions. This will alert the program whether or not to handle any errors caused by that function.
What an attacker can do
- Unexpected State (Availability, Integrity)
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability, Integrity)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Use a language or compiler that uses exceptions and requires the catching of those exceptions.
Implementation
- Properly check all functions which return a value.
- When designing any function make sure you return a value or throw an exception in case of an error.
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.