CWE-431: Missing Handler | Glexia
CWE-431 (Missing Handler) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-431: Missing Handler
Missing Handler represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-431 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-431, 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-431: Missing Handler
A handler is not available or implemented.
When an exception is thrown and not caught, the process has given up an opportunity to decide if a given failure or event is worth a change in execution.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- If a Servlet does not catch all exceptions, it may reveal debugging information that will help an adversary form a plan of attack. In the following method a DNS lookup failure will cause the Servlet to throw an exception. When a Servlet throws an exception, the default error response the Servlet container sends back to the user typically includes debugging information. This information is of great value to an attacker.
Remediation
- Implementation: Handle all possible situations (e.g. error condition).
- Implementation: If an operation can throw an Exception, implement a handler for that specific exception.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.