Weakness · Medium
CWE-374: Passing Mutable Objects to an Untrusted Method
What it is
The product sends non-cloned mutable data as an argument to a method or function.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Medium
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
The function or method that has been called can alter or delete the mutable data. This could violate assumptions that the calling function has made about its state. In situations where unknown code is called with references to mutable data, this external code could make changes to the data sent. If this data was not previously cloned, the modified data might not be valid in the context of execution.
What an attacker can do
- Modify Memory (Integrity)
How to prevent it
Implementation
- Pass in data which should not be altered as constant or immutable.
- Clone all mutable data before passing it into an external function . This is the preferred mitigation. This way, regardless of what changes are made to the data, a valid copy is retained for use by the class.
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.