CWE-455: Non-exit on Failed Initialization
Description
The product does not exit or otherwise modify its operation when security-relevant errors occur during initialization, such as when a configuration file has a format error or a hardware security module (HSM) cannot be activated, which can cause the product to execute in a less secure fashion than intended by the administrator.
Submission Date :
July 19, 2006, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
MITRE
Example - 1
The following code intends to limit certain operations to the administrator only. If the application is unable to extract the state information - say, due to a database timeout - then the $uid variable will not be explicitly set by the programmer. This will cause $uid to be regarded as equivalent to "0" in the conditional, allowing the original user to perform administrator actions. Even if the attacker cannot directly influence the state data, unexpected errors could cause incorrect privileges to be assigned to a user just by accident.
$uid = ExtractUserID($state);
// # do stuff//
DoAdminThings();$username = GetCurrentUser();$state = GetStateData($username);if (defined($state)) {}if ($uid == 0) {}
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.
Visit http://cwe.mitre.org/ for more details.