CWE

CWE-234 – Failure to Handle Missing Parameter

Read Time:2 Minute, 21 Second

Description

If too few arguments are sent to a function, the function will still pop the expected number of arguments from the stack. Potentially, a variable number of arguments could be exhausted in a function as well.

Modes of Introduction:

– Architecture and Design

 

Likelihood of Exploit: High

 

Related Weaknesses

CWE-233

 

Consequences

Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Access Control: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

There is the potential for arbitrary code execution with privileges of the vulnerable program if function parameter list is exhausted.

Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

Potentially a program could fail if it needs more arguments then are available.

 

Potential Mitigations

Phase: Build and Compilation

Description: 

This issue can be simply combated with the use of proper build process.

Phase: Implementation

Description: 

Forward declare all functions. This is the recommended solution. Properly forward declaration of all used functions will result in a compiler error if too few arguments are sent to a function.

CVE References

  • CVE-2004-0276
    • Server earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via an HTTP request with a sequence of “%” characters and a missing Host field.
  • CVE-2002-1488
    • Chat client allows remote malicious IRC servers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a PART message with (1) a missing channel or (2) a channel that the user is not in.
  • CVE-2002-1169
    • Proxy allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via an HTTP request to helpout.exe with a missing HTTP version numbers.
  • CVE-2000-0521
    • Web server allows disclosure of CGI source code via an HTTP request without the version number.
  • CVE-2001-0590
    • Application server allows a remote attacker to read the source code to arbitrary ‘jsp’ files via a malformed URL request which does not end with an HTTP protocol specification.
  • CVE-2003-0239
    • Chat software allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via malformed GIF89a headers that do not contain a GCT (Global Color Table) or an LCT (Local Color Table) after an Image Descriptor.
  • CVE-2002-1023
    • Server allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via an HTTP GET request without a URI.
  • CVE-2002-1531
    • Crash in HTTP request without a Content-Length field.
  • CVE-2002-1077
    • Crash in HTTP request without a Content-Length field.
  • CVE-2002-1358
    • Empty elements/strings in protocol test suite affect many SSH2 servers/clients.
  • CVE-2003-0477
    • FTP server crashes in PORT command without an argument.
  • CVE-2002-0107
    • Resultant infoleak in web server via GET requests without HTTP/1.0 version string.
  • CVE-2002-0596
    • GET request with empty parameter leads to error message infoleak (path disclosure).