CWE-1078: Inappropriate Source Code Style or Formatting | Glexia
CWE-1078 (Inappropriate Source Code Style or Formatting) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1078: Inappropriate Source Code Style or Formatting
Inappropriate Source Code Style or Formatting represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Increase Analytical Complexity: Variations in indentation and other white space, comments, etc. can make it more difficult for human analysts to understand the actual behavior that is being implemented.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1078 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-1078, 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-1078: Inappropriate Source Code Style or Formatting
The source code does not follow desired style or formatting for indentation, white space, comments, etc.
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.
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 Static Analysis - Source Code: An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or linter can report or highlight this weaknesses.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
- CWE-1076: Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions
- CWE-1085: Invokable Control Element with Excessive Volume of Commented-out Code
- CWE-1099: Inconsistent Naming Conventions for Identifiers
- CWE-1106: Insufficient Use of Symbolic Constants
- CWE-1107: Insufficient Isolation of Symbolic Constant Definitions
- CWE-1109: Use of Same Variable for Multiple Purposes
- CWE-1113: Inappropriate Comment Style
- CWE-1114: Inappropriate Whitespace Style
- CWE-1115: Source Code Element without Standard Prologue
- CWE-1116: Inaccurate Source Code Comments
- CWE-1117: Callable with Insufficient Behavioral Summary
- CWE-546: Suspicious Comment
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.