CWE-463: Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel
Description
The accidental deletion of a data-structure sentinel can cause serious programming logic problems.
Submission Date :
July 19, 2006, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
MITRE
Extended Description
Often times data-structure sentinels are used to mark structure of the data structure. A common example of this is the null character at the end of strings. Another common example is linked lists which may contain a sentinel to mark the end of the list. It is dangerous to allow this type of control data to be easily accessible. Therefore, it is important to protect from the deletion or modification outside of some wrapper interface which provides safety.
Example - 1
This example creates a null terminated string and prints it contents.
foo[counter]='a';
char *foo;int counter;foo=calloc(sizeof(char)*10);for (counter=0;counter!=10;counter++) {printf("%s\n",foo);}The string foo has space for 9 characters and a null terminator, but 10 characters are written to it. As a result, the string foo is not null terminated and calling printf() on it will have unpredictable and possibly dangerous results.
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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