CWE-1177: Use of Prohibited Code | Glexia
CWE-1177 (Use of Prohibited Code) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1177: Use of Prohibited Code
Use of Prohibited Code represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Reduce Maintainability
Developer Pattern
CWE-1177 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-1177, 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-1177: Use of Prohibited Code
The product uses a function, library, or third party component that has been explicitly prohibited, whether by the developer or the customer.
The developer - or customers - may wish to restrict or eliminate use of a function, library, or third party component for any number of reasons, including real or suspected vulnerabilities; difficulty to use securely; export controls or license requirements; obsolete or poorly-maintained code; internal code being scheduled for deprecation; etc. To reduce risk of vulnerabilities, the developer might maintain a list of "banned" functions that programmers must avoid using because the functions are difficult or impossible to use securely. This issue can also make the product more costly and difficult to maintain.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The code below calls the gets() function to read in data from the command line. However, gets() is inherently unsafe, because it copies all input from STDIN to the buffer without checking size. This allows the user to provide a string that is larger than the buffer size, resulting in an overflow condition.
- The following code attempts to create a local copy of a buffer to perform some manipulations to the data. However, the programmer does not ensure that the size of the data pointed to by string will fit in the local buffer and copies the data with the potentially dangerous strcpy() function. This may result in a buffer overflow condition if an attacker can influence the contents of the string parameter.
Remediation
- Build and Compilation Implementation: Identify a list of prohibited API functions and prohibit developers from using these functions, providing safer alternatives. In some cases, automatic code analysis tools or the compiler can be instructed to spot use of prohibited functions, such as the "banned.h" include file from Microsoft's SDL. [REF-554] [REF-1009] [REF-7]
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.