Weakness · Medium
CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
What it is
The product throws or raises an overly broad exceptions that can hide important details and produce inappropriate responses to certain conditions.
- 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
Declaring a method to throw Exception or Throwable promotes generic error handling procedures that make it difficult for callers to perform proper error handling and error recovery. For example, Java's exception mechanism makes it easy for callers to anticipate what can go wrong and write code to handle each specific exceptional circumstance. Declaring that a method throws a generic form of exception defeats this system.
What an attacker can do
- Hide Activities (Non-Repudiation, Other)
- Alter Execution Logic (Non-Repudiation, 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.)
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.