CWE-1076: Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions
Official CWE-1076 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-1076: Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions
Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Reduce Maintainability: This issue makes it more difficult to maintain the product, which indirectly affects security by making it more difficult or time-consuming to find and/or fix vulnerabilities. It also might make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1076 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-1076, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1076: Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions
The product's architecture, source code, design, documentation, or other artifact does not follow required conventions.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The usage of symbolic names instead of hard-coded constants is preferred. The following is an example of using a hard-coded constant instead of a symbolic name.,If the buffer value needs to be changed, then it has to be altered in more than one place. If the developer forgets or does not find all occurrences, in this example it could lead to a buffer overflow.,In this example the developer will only need to change one value and all references to the buffer size are updated, as a symbolic name is used instead of a hard-coded constant.
- The following code fragment calls finalize() explicitly:
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
- CWE-1045: Parent Class with a Virtual Destructor and a Child Class without a Virtual Destructor
- CWE-1070: Serializable Data Element Containing non-Serializable Item Elements
- CWE-710: Improper Adherence to Coding Standards
- CWE-1078: Inappropriate Source Code Style or Formatting
- CWE-1079: Parent Class without Virtual Destructor Method
- CWE-1082: Class Instance Self Destruction Control Element
- CWE-1087: Class with Virtual Method without a Virtual Destructor
- CWE-1091: Use of Object without Invoking Destructor Method
- CWE-1097: Persistent Storable Data Element without Associated Comparison Control Element
- CWE-1098: Data Element containing Pointer Item without Proper Copy Control Element
- CWE-1108: Excessive Reliance on Global Variables
- CWE-586: Explicit Call to Finalize()
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.