CWE-1038: Insecure Automated Optimizations
Official CWE-1038 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-1038: Insecure Automated Optimizations
Insecure Automated Optimizations represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Alter Execution Logic: The optimizations alter the order of execution resulting in side effects that were not intended by the original developer.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1038 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.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-1038, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1038: Insecure Automated Optimizations
The product uses a mechanism that automatically optimizes code, e.g. to improve a characteristic such as performance, but the optimizations can have an unintended side effect that might violate an intended security assumption.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code reads a password from the user, uses the password to connect to a back-end mainframe, and then attempts to scrub the password from memory using memset(). The code in the example will behave correctly if it is executed verbatim, but if the code is compiled using an optimizing compiler, then the call to memset() might be removed as a dead store, because the buffer pwd is not used after its value is overwritten. Because the buffer pwd contains a sensitive value, the application may be vulnerable to attack if the data are left memory resident. If attackers are able to access the correct region of memory, they may use the recovered password to gain control of the system.,It is common practice to overwrite sensitive data manipulated in memory, such as passwords or cryptographic keys, in order to prevent attackers from learning system secrets. However, with the advent of optimizing compilers, programs do not always behave as their source code alone would suggest. In the example, the compiler interprets the call to memset() as dead code because the memory being written to is not subsequently used, despite the fact that there is clearly a security motivation for the operation to occur. The problem here is that many compilers, and in fact many programming languages, do not take this and other security concerns into consideration in their efforts to improve efficiency.,Attackers typically exploit this type of vulnerability by using a core dump or runtime mechanism to access the memory used by a particular application and recover the secret information. Once an attacker has access to the secret information, it is relatively straightforward to further exploit the system and possibly compromise other resources with which the application interacts.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
- CWE-1037: Processor Optimization Removal or Modification of Security-critical Code
- CWE-435: Improper Interaction Between Multiple Correctly-Behaving Entities
- CWE-758: Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior
- CWE-733: Compiler Optimization Removal or Modification of Security-critical Code
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.