CWE-128: Wrap-around Error
Official CWE-128 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-128: Wrap-around Error
Wrap-around Error represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart,DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU),DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory),DoS: Instability: This weakness will generally lead to undefined behavior and therefore crashes. In the case of overflows involving loop index variables, the likelihood of infinite loops is also high.
- Integrity: Modify Memory: If the value in question is important to data (as opposed to flow), simple data corruption has occurred. Also, if the wrap around results in other conditions such as buffer overflows, further memory corruption may occur.
- Confidentiality,Availability,Access Control: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands,Bypass Protection Mechanism: This weakness can sometimes trigger buffer overflows which can be used to execute arbitrary code. This is usually outside the scope of a program's implicit security policy.
Developer Pattern
CWE-128 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-128, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-128: Wrap-around Error
Wrap around errors occur whenever a value is incremented past the maximum value for its type and therefore "wraps around" to a very small, negative, or undefined value.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following image processing code allocates a table for images. This code intends to allocate a table of size num_imgs, however as num_imgs grows large, the calculation determining the size of the list will eventually overflow (CWE-190). This will result in a very small list to be allocated instead. If the subsequent code operates on the list as if it were num_imgs long, it may result in many types of out-of-bounds problems (CWE-119).
Remediation
- Requirements specification: The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
- Architecture and Design: Provide clear upper and lower bounds on the scale of any protocols designed.
- Implementation: Perform validation on all incremented variables to ensure that they remain within reasonable bounds.
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.