CWE-1341: Multiple Releases of Same Resource or Handle | Glexia
CWE-1341 (Multiple Releases of Same Resource or Handle) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1341: Multiple Releases of Same Resource or Handle
Multiple Releases of Same Resource or Handle represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability,Integrity: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
Developer Pattern
CWE-1341 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-1341, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1341: Multiple Releases of Same Resource or Handle
The product attempts to close or release a resource or handle more than once, without any successful open between the close operations.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This example attempts to close a file twice. In some cases, the C library fclose() function will catch the error and return an error code. In other implementations, a double-free (CWE-415) occurs, causing the program to fault. Note that the examples presented here are simplistic, and double fclose() calls will frequently be spread around a program, making them more difficult to find during code reviews. ,
- The following code shows a simple example of a double free vulnerability. Double free vulnerabilities have two common (and sometimes overlapping) causes:, ,Although some double free vulnerabilities are not much more complicated than this example, most are spread out across hundreds of lines of code or even different files. Programmers seem particularly susceptible to freeing global variables more than once.
Remediation
- Implementation: Change the code's logic so that the resource is only closed once. This might require simplifying or refactoring. This fix can be simple to do in small code blocks, but more difficult when multiple closes are buried within complex conditionals.
- Implementation: It can be effective to implement a flag that is (1) set when the resource is opened, (2) cleared when it is closed, and (3) checked before closing. This approach can be useful when there are disparate cases in which closes must be performed. However, flag-tracking can increase code complexity and requires diligent compliance by the programmer.
- Implementation: When closing a resource, set the resource's associated variable to NULL or equivalent value for the given language. Some APIs will ignore this null value without causing errors. For other APIs, this can lead to application crashes or exceptions, which may still be preferable to corrupting an unintended resource such as memory or data.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: For commonly-used APIs and resource types, automated tools often have signatures that can spot this issue.
- Automated Dynamic Analysis: Some compiler instrumentation tools such as AddressSanitizer (ASan) can indirectly detect some instances of this weakness.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.