CWE-1071: Empty Code Block | Glexia
CWE-1071 (Empty Code Block) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1071: Empty Code Block
Empty Code Block represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Reduce Reliability
Developer Pattern
CWE-1071 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-1071, 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-1071: Empty Code Block
The source code contains a block that does not contain any code, i.e., the block is empty.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following Java example, the code catches an ArithmeticException. Since the exception block is empty, no action is taken.,In the code below the exception has been logged and the bad execution has been handled in the desired way allowing the program to continue in an expected way.
- The following code attempts to synchronize on an object, but does not execute anything in the synchronized block. This does not actually accomplish anything and may be a sign that a programmer is wrestling with synchronization but has not yet achieved the result they intend. Instead, in a correct usage, the synchronized statement should contain procedures that access or modify data that is exposed to multiple threads. For example, consider a scenario in which several threads are accessing student records at the same time. The method which sets the student ID to a new value will need to make sure that nobody else is accessing this data at the same time and will require synchronization.
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.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.