CWE-1235: Incorrect Use of Autoboxing and Unboxing for Performance Critical Operations
Official CWE-1235 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-1235: Incorrect Use of Autoboxing and Unboxing for Performance Critical Operations
Incorrect Use of Autoboxing and Unboxing for Performance Critical Operations represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU),DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory),DoS: Resource Consumption (Other),Reduce Performance: Incorrect autoboxing/unboxing would result in reduced performance, which sometimes can lead to resource consumption issues, impacting availability when used with generic collections.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1235 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-1235, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1235: Incorrect Use of Autoboxing and Unboxing for Performance Critical Operations
The code uses boxed primitives, which may introduce inefficiencies into performance-critical operations.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Java has a boxed primitive for each primitive type. A long can be represented with the boxed primitive Long. Issues arise where boxed primitives are used when not strictly necessary. In the above loop, we see that the count variable is declared as a boxed primitive. This causes autoboxing on the line that increments. This causes execution to be magnitudes less performant (time and possibly space) than if the "long" primitive was used to declare the count variable, which can impact availability of a resource.
- This code uses primitive long which fixes the issue.
Remediation
- Implementation: Use of boxed primitives should be limited to certain situations such as when calling methods with typed parameters. They should not be used for scientific computing or other performance critical operations. They are only suited to support "impedance mismatch" between reference types and primitives. Examine the use of boxed primitives prior to use. Use SparseArrays or ArrayMap instead of HashMap to avoid performance overhead.
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.