CWE-628

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
Function Call with Incorrectly Specified Arguments

Description

The product calls a function, procedure, or routine with arguments that are not correctly specified, leading to always-incorrect behavior and resultant weaknesses.

There are multiple ways in which this weakness can be introduced, including: the wrong variable or reference; an incorrect number of arguments; incorrect order of arguments; wrong type of arguments; or wrong value.

Consequences

Other, Access Control — Quality Degradation, Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

This weakness can cause unintended behavior and can lead to additional weaknesses such as allowing an attacker to gain unintended access to system resources.

Mitigations

Phase: Build and Compilation

Once found, these issues are easy to fix. Use code inspection tools and relevant compiler features to identify potential violations. Pay special attention to code that is not likely to be exercised heavily during QA.

Phase: Architecture and Design

Make sure your API's are stable before you use them in production code.

Detection

Other

Since these bugs typically introduce incorrect behavior that is obvious to users, they are found quickly, unless they occur in rarely-tested code paths. Managing the correct number of arguments can be made more difficult in cases where format strings are used, or when variable numbers of arguments are supported.