CWE-397—Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception

Weakness Name

Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception

Description

The product throws or raises an overly broad exceptions that can hide important details and produce inappropriate responses to certain conditions.

Declaring a method to throw Exception or Throwable promotes generic error handling procedures that make it difficult for callers to perform proper error handling and error recovery. For example, Java's exception mechanism makes it easy for callers to anticipate what can go wrong and write code to handle each specific exceptional circumstance. Declaring that a method throws a generic form of exception defeats this system.

Common Consequences

Scope:

Non-Repudiation, Other

Impact:

Hide Activities, Alter Execution Logic

Notes:

Throwing a generic exception can hide details about unexpected adversary activities by making it difficult to properly troubleshoot error conditions during execution.

Related Weaknesses

• CWE-221Information Loss or Omission
• CWE-703Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions
• CWE-705Incorrect Control Flow Scoping