Description

The product releases a resource that is still intended to be used by itself or another actor.

Extended Description

This weakness focuses on errors in which the product should not release a resource, but performs the release anyway. This is different than a weakness in which the product releases a resource at the appropriate time, but it maintains a reference to the resource, which it later accesses. For this weakness, the resource should still be valid upon the subsequent access.

When a product releases a resource that is still being used, it is possible that operations will still be taken on this resource, which may have been repurposed in the meantime, leading to issues similar to CWE-825. Consequences may include denial of service, information exposure, or code execution.

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.