Weakness · Medium
CWE-909: Missing Initialization of Resource
What it is
The product does not initialize a critical resource.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Medium
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Many resources require initialization before they can be properly used. If a resource is not initialized, it could contain unpredictable or expired data, or it could be initialized to defaults that are invalid. This can have security implications when the resource is expected to have certain properties or values.
What an attacker can do
- Read Memory (Confidentiality)
- Read Application Data (Confidentiality)
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability)
How to prevent it
Implementation
- Explicitly initialize the resource before use. If this is performed through an API function or standard procedure, follow all specified steps.
- Pay close attention to complex conditionals that affect initialization, since some branches might not perform the initialization.
- Avoid race conditions (CWE-362) during initialization routines.
Build and Compilation
- Run or compile your product with settings that generate warnings about uninitialized variables or data.
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.