Weakness · Medium
CWE-579: J2EE Bad Practices: Non-serializable Object Stored in Session
What it is
The product stores a non-serializable object as an HttpSession attribute, which can hurt reliability.
- 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
A J2EE application can make use of multiple JVMs in order to improve application reliability and performance. In order to make the multiple JVMs appear as a single application to the end user, the J2EE container can replicate an HttpSession object across multiple JVMs so that if one JVM becomes unavailable another can step in and take its place without disrupting the flow of the application. This is only possible if all session data is serializable, allowing the session to be duplicated between the JVMs.
What an attacker can do
- Quality Degradation (Other)
How to prevent it
Implementation
- In order for session replication to work, the values the product stores as attributes in the session must implement the Serializable interface.
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.)
H2 Security
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.