logo

CWE-754 - Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions

CWE-754 Medium

  • Abstraction:
  • Class
  • Structure:
  • Simple
  • Status:
  • Incomplete
Weakness Name

Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions

Description

The product does not check or incorrectly checks for unusual or exceptional conditions that are not expected to occur frequently during day to day operation of the product.

The programmer may assume that certain events or conditions will never occur or do not need to be worried about, such as low memory conditions, lack of access to resources due to restrictive permissions, or misbehaving clients or components. However, attackers may intentionally trigger these unusual conditions, thus violating the programmer's assumptions, possibly introducing instability, incorrect behavior, or a vulnerability. Note that this entry is not exclusively about the use of exceptions and exception handling, which are mechanisms for both checking and handling unusual or unexpected conditions.

Common Consequences

Scope: Integrity, Availability

Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, Unexpected State

Notes: The data which were produced as a result of a function call could be in a bad state upon return. If the return value is not checked, then this bad data may be used in operations, possibly leading to a crash or other unintended behaviors.

Related Weaknesses
  • Release Date:
  • 2009-03-10
  • Latest Modification Date:
  • 2024-07-16

Free security scan for your website