CWE-459: Incomplete Cleanup | Glexia
CWE-459 (Incomplete Cleanup) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-459: Insufficient Cleanup
Incomplete Cleanup represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other,Confidentiality,Integrity: Other,Read Application Data,Modify Application Data,DoS: Resource Consumption (Other): It is possible to overflow the number of temporary files because directories typically have limits on the number of files allowed. This could create a denial of service problem.
Developer Pattern
CWE-459 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-459, 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-459: Incomplete Cleanup
The product does not properly "clean up" and remove temporary or supporting resources after they have been used.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Stream resources in a Java application should be released in a finally block, otherwise an exception thrown before the call to close() would result in an unreleased I/O resource. In the example below, the close() method is called in the try block (incorrect).
Remediation
- Architecture and Design,Implementation: Temporary files and other supporting resources should be deleted/released immediately after they are no longer needed.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.