Weakness · Medium
CWE-460: Improper Cleanup on Thrown Exception
What it is
The product does not clean up its state or incorrectly cleans up its state when an exception is thrown, leading to unexpected state or control flow.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Medium
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Often, when functions or loops become complicated, some level of resource cleanup is needed throughout execution. Exceptions can disturb the flow of the code and prevent the necessary cleanup from happening.
What an attacker can do
- Varies by Context (Other)
How to prevent it
Implementation
- If one breaks from a loop or function by throwing an exception, make sure that cleanup happens or that you should exit the program. Use throwing exceptions sparsely.
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.