CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
Official CWE-397 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Non-Repudiation,Other: Hide Activities,Alter Execution Logic: Throwing a generic exception can hide details about unexpected adversary activities by making it difficult to properly troubleshoot error conditions during execution.
Developer Pattern
CWE-397 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-397, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
The product throws or raises an overly broad exceptions that can hide important details and produce inappropriate responses to certain conditions.
Declaring a method to throw Exception or Throwable promotes generic error handling procedures that make it difficult for callers to perform proper error handling and error recovery. For example, Java's exception mechanism makes it easy for callers to anticipate what can go wrong and write code to handle each specific exceptional circumstance. Declaring that a method throws a generic form of exception defeats this system.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following method throws three types of exceptions. While it might seem tidier to write,doing so hampers the caller's ability to understand and handle the exceptions that occur. Further, if a later revision of doExchange() introduces a new type of exception that should be treated differently than previous exceptions, there is no easy way to enforce this requirement.
- Early versions of C++ (C++98, C++03, C++11) included a feature known as Dynamic Exception Specification. This allowed functions to declare what type of exceptions it may throw. It is possible to declare a general class of exception to cover any derived exceptions that may be thrown. In the example above, the code declares that myfunction() can throw an exception of type "std::exception" thus hiding details about the possible derived exceptions that could potentially be thrown.
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.