Weakness · Medium
CWE-573: Improper Following of Specification by Caller
What it is
The product does not follow or incorrectly follows the specifications as required by the implementation language, environment, framework, protocol, or platform.
- 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
When leveraging external functionality, such as an API, it is important that the caller does so in accordance with the requirements of the external functionality or else unintended behaviors may result, possibly leaving the system vulnerable to any number of exploits.
What an attacker can do
- Quality Degradation (Other)
- Varies by Context (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.