CWE-482

Variant 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: Low
Comparing instead of Assigning

Description

The code uses an operator for comparison when the intention was to perform an assignment.

In many languages, the compare statement is very close in appearance to the assignment statement; they are often confused.

Consequences

Availability, Integrity — Unexpected State

The assignment will not take place, which should cause obvious program execution problems.

Mitigations

Phase: Testing

Many IDEs and static analysis products will detect this problem.

Detection

Automated Static Analysis

Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)