CWE Reference
CWE-456: Missing Initialization of a Variable | Glexia
CWE-456 (Missing Initialization of a Variable) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Release 4.20weaknessDraft
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-456: Missing Initialization of a Variable
Missing Initialization of a Variable represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity Other: Unexpected State Quality Degradation Varies by Context: The uninitialized data may be invalid, causing logic errors within the program. In some cases, this could result in a security problem.
Developer Pattern
CWE-456 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-456, 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-456: Missing Initialization of a Variable
The product does not initialize critical variables, which causes the execution environment to use unexpected values.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This function attempts to extract a pair of numbers from a user-supplied string. This code attempts to extract two integer values out of a formatted, user-supplied input. However, if an attacker were to provide an input of the form: then only the m variable will be initialized. Subsequent use of n may result in the use of an uninitialized variable (CWE-457).
- Here, an uninitialized field in a Java class is used in a seldom-called method, which would cause a NullPointerException to be thrown.
- This code first authenticates a user, then allows a delete command if the user is an administrator. The $isAdmin variable is set to true if the user is an admin, but is uninitialized otherwise. If PHP's register_globals feature is enabled, an attacker can set uninitialized variables like $isAdmin to arbitrary values, in this case gaining administrator privileges by setting $isAdmin to true.
- In the following Java code the BankManager class uses the user variable of the class User to allow authorized users to perform bank manager tasks. The user variable is initialized within the method setUser that retrieves the User from the User database. The user is then authenticated as unauthorized user through the method authenticateUser. However, if the method setUser is not called before authenticateUser then the user variable will not have been initialized and will result in a NullPointerException. The code should verify that the user variable has been initialized before it is used, as in the following code.
- This example will leave test_string in an unknown condition when i is the same value as err_val, because test_string is not initialized (CWE-456). Depending on where this code segment appears (e.g. within a function body), test_string might be random if it is stored on the heap or stack. If the variable is declared in static memory, it might be zero or NULL. Compiler optimization might contribute to the unpredictability of this address. When the printf() is reached, test_string might be an unexpected address, so the printf might print junk strings (CWE-457). To fix this code, there are a couple approaches to making sure that test_string has been properly set once it reaches the printf(). One solution would be to set test_string to an acceptable default before the conditional: Another solution is to ensure that each branch of the conditional - including the default/else branch - could ensure that test_string is set:
- Consider the following merchant server application as implemented in [REF-1475]. It receives card payment information (orderPgData instance in OrderPgData.java) from the payment gateway (such as PayPal). The next step is to complete the payment (finalizeOrder() in Main.java). The merchant server validates the amount (validateAmount() in OrderPgData.java), and if the validation is successful, then the payment is completed. In PgServiceResolver.java, when pgType is "card" indicating a card payment, orderPgData.validateAmount() is not called - that is, the amount is not validated to be the same as the expected price. Since isPaymentAmountTampered is declared as a private boolean, but it is not initialized, it is forcibly initialized to false by the Java compiler [REF-1476]. If the adversary modifies the price, e.g., changing paymentAmount from 100 to 10, then no validation is performed. Since isPaymentAmountTampered is "false" because of the default initialization, the code finishes processing the payment because it does not believe that the amount has been changed. This weakness could be addressed by setting the value of isPaymentAmountTampered to true. This is a "secure-by-default" value that reflects a "default deny" policy - i.e., it's assumed that the payment amount is tampered, and only a special validation step can change this assumption.
Remediation
- Implementation: Ensure that critical variables are initialized before first use [REF-1485].
- Requirements: Choose a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
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
No related CWE relationships are published yet.
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.