CWE-382: J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit()
Official CWE-382 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-382: J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit()
J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit() represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
Developer Pattern
CWE-382 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-382, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-382: J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit()
A J2EE application uses System.exit(), which also shuts down its container.
It is never a good idea for a web application to attempt to shut down the application container. Access to a function that can shut down the application is an avenue for Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Included in the doPost() method defined below is a call to System.exit() in the event of a specific exception.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: The shutdown function should be a privileged function available only to a properly authorized administrative user
- Implementation: Web applications should not call methods that cause the virtual machine to exit, such as System.exit()
- Implementation: Web applications should also not throw any Throwables to the application server as this may adversely affect the container.
- Implementation: Non-web applications may have a main() method that contains a System.exit(), but generally should not call System.exit() from other locations in the code
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.