CWE-588

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 Incomplete 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
Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer

Description

Casting a non-structure type to a structure type and accessing a field can lead to memory access errors or data corruption.

Consequences

Integrity — Modify Memory

Adjacent variables in memory may be corrupted by assignments performed on fields after the cast.

Availability — DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

Execution may end due to a memory access error.

Mitigations

Phase: Requirements

The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.

Phase: Implementation

Review of type casting operations can identify locations where incompatible types are cast.

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.)