CWE-1164: Irrelevant Code | Glexia
CWE-1164 (Irrelevant Code) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1164: Irrelevant Code
Irrelevant Code represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Reduce Reliability
- Other: Reduce Performance
Developer Pattern
CWE-1164 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-1164, 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-1164: Irrelevant Code
The product contains code that is not essential for execution, i.e. makes no state changes and has no side effects that alter data or control flow, such that removal of the code would have no impact to functionality or correctness.
Irrelevant code could include dead code, initialization that is not used, empty blocks, code that could be entirely removed due to optimization, etc.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The condition for the second if statement is impossible to satisfy. It requires that the variables be non-null. However, on the only path where s can be assigned a non-null value, there is a return statement.
- The following code excerpt assigns to the variable r and then overwrites the value without using it.
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.