CWE-1106: Insufficient Use of Symbolic Constants
Official CWE-1106 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-1106: Insufficient Use of Symbolic Constants
Insufficient Use of Symbolic Constants 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 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-1106 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-1106, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1106: Insufficient Use of Symbolic Constants
The source code uses literal constants that may need to change or evolve over time, instead of using symbolic constants.
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.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.