CWE-253: Incorrect Check of Function Return Value
Official CWE-253 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-253: Incorrect Check of Function Return Value
Incorrect Check of Function Return Value represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability,Integrity: Unexpected State,DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart: An unexpected return value could place the system in a state that could lead to a crash or other unintended behaviors.
Developer Pattern
CWE-253 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-253, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-253: Incorrect Check of Function Return Value
The product incorrectly checks a return value from a function, which prevents it from detecting errors or exceptional conditions.
Important and common functions will return some value about the success of its actions. This will alert the program whether or not to handle any errors caused by that function.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This code attempts to allocate memory for 4 integers and checks if the allocation succeeds. The code assumes that only a negative return value would indicate an error, but malloc() may return a null pointer when there is an error. The value of tmp could then be equal to 0, and the error would be missed.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use a language or compiler that uses exceptions and requires the catching of those exceptions.
- Implementation: Properly check all functions which return a value.
- Implementation: When designing any function make sure you return a value or throw an exception in case of an error.
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.