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Weakness · Medium

CWE-703: Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions

What it is

The product does not properly anticipate or handle exceptional conditions that rarely occur during normal operation of the product.

1 exploited in the wildMITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
Medium
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild
1 known exploited CVE

What an attacker can do

  • Read Application Data (Confidentiality, Availability, Integrity)
  • DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Confidentiality, Availability, Integrity)
  • Unexpected State (Confidentiality, Availability, Integrity)

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

  • Dynamic Analysis with Manual Results Interpretation. According to SOAR, the following detection techniques may be useful: Highly cost effective: Fault Injection - source code Fault Injection - binary Cost effective for partial coverage: Forced Path Execution
  • Manual Static Analysis - Source Code. According to SOAR, the following detection techniques may be useful: Highly cost effective: Manual Source Code Review (not inspections) Cost effective for partial coverage: Focused Manual Spotcheck - Focused manual analysis of source
  • Automated Static Analysis - Source Code. According to SOAR, the following detection techniques may be useful: Cost effective for partial coverage: Source code Weakness Analyzer Context-configured Source Code Weakness Analyzer
  • Architecture or Design Review. According to SOAR, the following detection techniques may be useful: Highly cost effective: Inspection (IEEE 1028 standard) (can apply to requirements, design, source code, etc.) Formal Methods / Correct-By-Construction

CWE-703 on MITRE's CWE site

Exploited in the wild: 1 CVE

Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-703 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.

All known exploited vulnerabilities

H2 Security

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.