CWE-1120: Excessive Code Complexity | Glexia
CWE-1120 (Excessive Code Complexity) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1120: Excessive Code Complexity
Excessive Code Complexity 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/or 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: Reduce Performance: This issue can make the product perform more slowly. If the relevant code is reachable by an attacker, then this performance problem might introduce a vulnerability.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1120 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-1120, 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-1120: Excessive Code Complexity
The code is too complex, as calculated using a well-defined, quantitative measure.
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
- 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-1047: Modules with Circular Dependencies
- CWE-1056: Invokable Control Element with Variadic Parameters
- CWE-1060: Excessive Number of Inefficient Server-Side Data Accesses
- CWE-1064: Invokable Control Element with Signature Containing an Excessive Number of Parameters
- CWE-1075: Unconditional Control Flow Transfer outside of Switch Block
- CWE-1080: Source Code File with Excessive Number of Lines of Code
- CWE-1095: Loop Condition Value Update within the Loop
- CWE-1119: Excessive Use of Unconditional Branching
- CWE-710: Improper Adherence to Coding Standards
- CWE-1121: Excessive McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity
- CWE-1122: Excessive Halstead Complexity
- CWE-1123: Excessive Use of Self-Modifying Code
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.