CWE-401: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime | Glexia
CWE-401 (Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-401: Memory Leak
Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime 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 DoS: Instability DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU) DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory): Most memory leaks result in general product reliability problems, but if an attacker can intentionally trigger a memory leak, the attacker might be able to launch a denial of service attack (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected program behavior resulting from a low memory condition.
- Other: Reduce Performance
Developer Pattern
CWE-401 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-401, 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-401: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime
The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following C function leaks a block of allocated memory if the call to read() does not return the expected number of bytes:
Remediation
- Implementation: Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone. For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers. When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391]. To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.
- Architecture and Design: Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.
- Architecture and Design Build and Compilation: Consider using the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector (bdwgc), which can help avoid leaks.
Detection
- Fuzzing: Fuzz testing (fuzzing) is a powerful technique for generating large numbers of diverse inputs - either randomly or algorithmically - and dynamically invoking the code with those inputs. Even with random inputs, it is often capable of generating unexpected results such as crashes, memory corruption, or resource consumption. Fuzzing effectively produces repeatable test cases that clearly indicate bugs, which helps developers to diagnose the issues.
- Automated Dynamic Analysis: Use tools that are integrated during compilation to insert runtime error-checking mechanisms related to memory safety errors, such as AddressSanitizer (ASan) for C/C++ [REF-1518] or valgrind [REF-480].
- 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.