CWE-758: Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or… | Glexia
CWE-758 (Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-758: Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior
Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Reduce Maintainability,Unexpected State,Quality Degradation
Developer Pattern
CWE-758 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-758, 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-758: Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior
The product uses an API function, data structure, or other entity in a way that relies on properties that are not always guaranteed to hold for that entity.
This can lead to resultant weaknesses when the required properties change, such as when the product is ported to a different platform or if an interaction error (CWE-435) occurs.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This code assumes a particular function will always be found at a particular address. It assigns a pointer to that address and calls the function. The same function may not always be found at the same memory address. This could lead to a crash, or an attacker may alter the memory at the expected address, leading to arbitrary code execution.
- The following function returns a stack address.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Fuzzing: Fuzz testing (fuzzing) is a powerful technique for generating large numbers of diverse inputs - either randomly or algorithmically - and dynamically invoking the code with those inputs. Even with random inputs, it is often capable of generating unexpected results such as crashes, memory corruption, or resource consumption. Fuzzing effectively produces repeatable test cases that clearly indicate bugs, which helps developers to diagnose the issues.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
- CWE-1038: Insecure Automated Optimizations
- CWE-1102: Reliance on Machine-Dependent Data Representation
- CWE-1103: Use of Platform-Dependent Third Party Components
- CWE-1105: Insufficient Encapsulation of Machine-Dependent Functionality
- CWE-474: Use of Function with Inconsistent Implementations
- CWE-562: Return of Stack Variable Address
- CWE-587: Assignment of a Fixed Address to a Pointer
- CWE-588: Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer
- CWE-710: Improper Adherence to Coding Standards
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.