CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
Description
Throwing overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.
Submission Date :
July 19, 2006, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
MITRE
Extended Description
Declaring a method to throw Exception or Throwable makes it difficult for callers to perform proper error handling and error recovery. Java's exception mechanism, for example, is set up to make it easy for callers to anticipate what can go wrong and write code to handle each specific exceptional circumstance. Declaring that a method throws a generic form of exception defeats this system.
Example - 1
The following method throws three types of exceptions.
...public void doExchange() throws IOException, InvocationTargetException, SQLException {}While it might seem tidier to write
...public void doExchange() throws Exception {}doing so hampers the caller's ability to understand and handle the exceptions that occur. Further, if a later revision of doExchange() introduces a new type of exception that should be treated differently than previous exceptions, there is no easy way to enforce this requirement.
Example - 2
Early versions of C++ (C++98, C++03, C++11) included a feature known as Dynamic Exception Specification. This allowed functions to declare what type of exceptions it may throw. It is possible to declare a general class of exception to cover any derived exceptions that may be throw.
if (0) throw out_of_range();throw length_error();int myfunction() throw(std::exception) {}In the example above, the code declares that myfunction() can throw an exception of type "std::exception" thus hiding details about the possible derived exceptions that could potentially be thrown.
Related Weaknesses
This table shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined to give an overview of the different insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction.
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