Weakness · Medium

CWE-582: Array Declared Public, Final, and Static

What it is

The product declares an array public, final, and static, which is not sufficient to prevent the array's contents from being modified.

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

Because arrays are mutable objects, the final constraint requires that the array object itself be assigned only once, but makes no guarantees about the values of the array elements. Since the array is public, a malicious program can change the values stored in the array. As such, in most cases an array declared public, final and static is a bug.

What an attacker can do

  • Modify Application Data (Integrity)

How to prevent it

Implementation

  • In most situations the array should be made private.

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-582 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.