CWE-1086: Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes | Glexia
CWE-1086 (Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1086: Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes
Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Reduce Maintainability Increase Analytical Complexity: This issue makes it more difficult to understand and maintain the software, 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-1086 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-1086, 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-1086: Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes
A class contains an unnecessarily large number of children.
While the interpretation of "large number of children" may vary for each product or developer, CISQ recommends a default maximum of 10 child classes.
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
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.