CWE-245: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Management of Connections
Official CWE-245 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-245: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Management of Connections
J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Management of Connections represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Quality Degradation
Developer Pattern
CWE-245 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-245, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-245: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Management of Connections
The J2EE application directly manages connections, instead of using the container's connection management facilities.
The J2EE standard forbids the direct management of connections. It requires that applications use the container's resource management facilities to obtain connections to resources. Every major web application container provides pooled database connection management as part of its resource management framework. Duplicating this functionality in an application is difficult and error prone, which is part of the reason it is forbidden under the J2EE standard.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following example, the class DatabaseConnection opens and manages a connection to a database for a J2EE application. The method openDatabaseConnection opens a connection to the database using a DriverManager to create the Connection object conn to the database specified in the string constant CONNECT_STRING. The use of the DriverManager class to directly manage the connection to the database violates the J2EE restriction against the direct management of connections. The J2EE application should use the web application container's resource management facilities to obtain a connection to the database as shown in the following example.
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.