Weakness · Medium

CWE-546: Suspicious Comment

What it is

The code contains comments that suggest the presence of bugs, incomplete functionality, or weaknesses.

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

Many suspicious comments, such as BUG, HACK, FIXME, LATER, LATER2, TODO, in the code indicate missing security functionality and checking. Others indicate code problems that programmers should fix, such as hard-coded variables, error handling, not using stored procedures, and performance issues.

What an attacker can do

  • Quality Degradation (Other)

How to prevent it

Documentation

  • Remove comments that suggest the presence of bugs, incomplete functionality, or weaknesses, before deploying the application.

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-546 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.