CWE-374

Base Abstraction Level
Pillar — Highest-level weakness category
Class — Abstract, language-independent
Base — Specific enough to detect
Variant — Tied to specific technology
Compound — Requires multiple weaknesses Draft MITRE CWE Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development, may change
Incomplete — Partially defined by MITRE
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CWE Exploit: Medium
Passing Mutable Objects to an Untrusted Method

Description

The product sends non-cloned mutable data as an argument to a method or function.

The function or method that has been called can alter or delete the mutable data. This could violate assumptions that the calling function has made about its state. In situations where unknown code is called with references to mutable data, this external code could make changes to the data sent. If this data was not previously cloned, the modified data might not be valid in the context of execution.

Consequences

Integrity — Modify Memory

Potentially data could be tampered with by another function which should not have been tampered with.

Mitigations

Phase: Implementation

Pass in data which should not be altered as constant or immutable.

Phase: Implementation

Clone all mutable data before passing it into an external function . This is the preferred mitigation. This way, regardless of what changes are made to the data, a valid copy is retained for use by the class.