The product manages resources or behaves in a way that indirectly creates a new, distinct resource that can be used by attackers in violation of the intended policy.
Modes of Introduction:
Any condition where the attacker has the ability to write an arbitrary value to an arbitrary location, often as the result of a buffer overflow.
Modes of Introduction:
– Implementation
Likelihood of Exploit: High
Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Access Control: Modify Memory, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, Bypass Protection Mechanism
Clearly, write-what-where conditions can be used to write data to areas of memory outside the scope of a policy. Also, they almost invariably can be used to execute arbitrary code, which is usually outside the scope of a program’s implicit security policy. If the attacker can overwrite a pointer’s worth of memory (usually 32 or 64 bits), they can redirect a function pointer to their own malicious code. Even when the attacker can only modify a single byte arbitrary code execution can be possible. Sometimes this is because the same problem can be exploited repeatedly to the same effect. Other times it is because the attacker can overwrite security-critical application-specific data — such as a flag indicating whether the user is an administrator.
Integrity, Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, Modify Memory
Many memory accesses can lead to program termination, such as when writing to addresses that are invalid for the current process.
Access Control, Other: Bypass Protection Mechanism, Other
When the consequence is arbitrary code execution, this can often be used to subvert any other security service.
Phase: Architecture and Design
Description:
Use a language that provides appropriate memory abstractions.
Phase: Operation
Description:
Use OS-level preventative functionality integrated after the fact. Not a complete solution.
The code is too complex, as calculated using a well-defined,
quantitative measure.
Modes of Introduction:
Other: Reduce Maintainability
Other: Reduce Performance
The code contains McCabe cyclomatic complexity that exceeds a
desirable maximum.
Modes of Introduction:
The code is structured in a way that a Halstead complexity
measure exceeds a desirable maximum.
Modes of Introduction:
Other: Reduce Maintainability
The product uses too much self-modifying
code.
Modes of Introduction:
Other: Reduce Maintainability
The code contains a callable or other code grouping in which
the nesting / branching is too deep.
Modes of Introduction:
Other: Reduce Maintainability
The product has an attack surface whose quantitative
measurement exceeds a desirable maximum.
Modes of Introduction:
The source code declares a variable in one scope, but the
variable is only used within a narrower scope.
Modes of Introduction:
Other: Reduce Maintainability
The code is compiled without sufficient warnings enabled, which
may prevent the detection of subtle bugs or quality
issues.
Modes of Introduction:
– Build and Compilation
Other: Reduce Maintainability