CWE-248: Uncaught Exception | Glexia
CWE-248 (Uncaught Exception) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-248: Uncaught Exception
Uncaught Exception represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability Confidentiality: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart Read Application Data: An uncaught exception could cause the system to be placed in a state that could lead to a crash, exposure of sensitive information or other unintended behaviors.
Developer Pattern
CWE-248 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-248, 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-248: Uncaught Exception
An exception is thrown from a function, but it is not caught.
When an exception is not caught, it may cause the program to crash or expose sensitive information.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example attempts to resolve a hostname. A DNS lookup failure will cause the Servlet to throw an exception.
- The _alloca() function allocates memory on the stack. If an allocation request is too large for the available stack space, _alloca() throws an exception. If the exception is not caught, the program will crash, potentially enabling a denial of service attack. _alloca() has been deprecated as of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005(R). It has been replaced with the more secure _alloca_s().
- EnterCriticalSection() can raise an exception, potentially causing the program to crash. Under operating systems prior to Windows 2000, the EnterCriticalSection() function can raise an exception in low memory situations. If the exception is not caught, the program will crash, potentially enabling a denial of service attack.
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.