CWE-1116: Inaccurate Source Code Comments | Glexia
CWE-1116 (Inaccurate Source Code Comments) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1116: Inaccurate Source Code Comments
Inaccurate Source Code Comments 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.
- Other: Increase Analytical Complexity: When a comment does not accurately reflect the associated code elements, this can introduce confusion to a reviewer (due to inconsistencies) or make it more difficult and less efficient to validate that the code is implementing the intended behavior correctly.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1116 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-1116, 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-1116: Inaccurate Source Code Comments
The source code contains comments that do not accurately describe or explain aspects of the portion of the code with which the comment is associated.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following Java example the code performs a calculation to determine how much medicine to administer. A comment is provided to give insight into what the calculation shoud be doing. Unfortunately the comment does not match the actual code and thus leaves the reader to wonder which is correct. In the correction below, the code functionality has been verified, and the comment has been corrected to reflect the proper calculation. Note that in real-world code, these values should be validated to disallow negative numbers, prevent integer overflow, etc.
Remediation
- Implementation: Verify that each comment accurately reflects what is intended to happen during execution of the code.
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.