CWE-822: Untrusted Pointer Dereference | Glexia
CWE-822 (Untrusted Pointer Dereference) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-822: Untrusted Pointer Dereference
Untrusted Pointer Dereference represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Memory: If the untrusted pointer is used in a read operation, an attacker might be able to read sensitive portions of memory.
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart: If the untrusted pointer references a memory location that is not accessible to the product, or points to a location that is "malformed" or larger than expected by a read or write operation, the application may terminate unexpectedly.
- Integrity,Confidentiality,Availability: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands,Modify Memory: If the untrusted pointer is used in a function call, or points to unexpected data in a write operation, then code execution may be possible.
Developer Pattern
CWE-822 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-822, 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-822: Untrusted Pointer Dereference
The product obtains a value from an untrusted source, converts this value to a pointer, and dereferences the resulting pointer.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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.)
- Automated Dynamic Analysis: Use tools that are integrated during compilation to insert runtime error-checking mechanisms related to memory safety errors, such as AddressSanitizer (ASan) for C/C++ [REF-1518].
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
No related CWE relationships are published yet.
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.