CWE-594: J2EE Framework: Saving Unserializable Objects to Disk
Description
When the J2EE container attempts to write unserializable objects to disk there is no guarantee that the process will complete successfully.
Submission Date :
Dec. 15, 2006, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
MITRE
Extended Description
In heavy load conditions, most J2EE application frameworks flush objects to disk to manage memory requirements of incoming requests. For example, session scoped objects, and even application scoped objects, are written to disk when required. While these application frameworks do the real work of writing objects to disk, they do not enforce that those objects be serializable, thus leaving the web application vulnerable to crashes induced by serialization failure. An attacker may be able to mount a denial of service attack by sending enough requests to the server to force the web application to save objects to disk.
Example - 1
In the following Java example, a Customer Entity JavaBean provides access to customer information in a database for a business application. The Customer Entity JavaBean is used as a session scoped object to return customer information to a Session EJB.
private String id;private String firstName;private String lastName;private Address address;public Customer() {}public Customer(String id, String firstName, String lastName) {...}@Idpublic String getCustomerId() {...}public void setCustomerId(String id) {...}public String getFirstName() {...}public void setFirstName(String firstName) {...}public String getLastName() {...}public void setLastName(String lastName) {...}@OneToOne()public Address getAddress() {...}public void setAddress(Address address) {...}
@Entitypublic class Customer {}However, the Customer Entity JavaBean is an unserialized object which can cause serialization failure and crash the application when the J2EE container attempts to write the object to the system. Session scoped objects must implement the Serializable interface to ensure that the objects serialize properly.
public class Customer implements Serializable {...}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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