CWE-234: Failure to Handle Missing Parameter | Glexia
CWE-234 (Failure to Handle Missing Parameter) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-234: Failure to Handle Missing Parameter
Failure to Handle Missing Parameter represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity Confidentiality Availability Access Control: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: There is the potential for arbitrary code execution with privileges of the vulnerable program if function parameter list is exhausted.
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart: Potentially a program could fail if it needs more arguments then are available.
Developer Pattern
CWE-234 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-234, 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-234: Failure to Handle Missing Parameter
If too few arguments are sent to a function, the function will still pop the expected number of arguments from the stack. Potentially, a variable number of arguments could be exhausted in a function as well.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness. This can be exploited to disclose information with no work whatsoever. In fact, each time this function is run, it will print out the next 4 bytes on the stack after the two numbers sent to it.
Remediation
- Build and Compilation: This issue can be simply combated with the use of proper build process.
- Implementation: Forward declare all functions. This is the recommended solution. Properly forward declaration of all used functions will result in a compiler error if too few arguments are sent to a function.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.