CWE-246: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Use of Sockets | Glexia
CWE-246 (J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Use of Sockets) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-246: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Use of Sockets
J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Use of Sockets 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-246 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-246, 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-246: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Use of Sockets
The J2EE application directly uses sockets instead of using framework method calls.
The J2EE standard permits the use of sockets only for the purpose of communication with legacy systems when no higher-level protocol is available. Authoring your own communication protocol requires wrestling with difficult security issues. Without significant scrutiny by a security expert, chances are good that a custom communication protocol will suffer from security problems. Many of the same issues apply to a custom implementation of a standard protocol. While there are usually more resources available that address security concerns related to implementing a standard protocol, these resources are also available to attackers.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example opens a socket to connect to a remote server. A Socket object is created directly within the Java servlet, which is a dangerous way to manage remote connections.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use framework method calls instead of using sockets directly.
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.