CWE-463: Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel | Glexia
CWE-463 (Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-463: Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel
Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability Other: Other: Generally this error will cause the data structure to not work properly.
- Authorization Other: Other: If a control character, such as NULL is removed, one may cause resource access control problems.
Developer Pattern
CWE-463 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-463, 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-463: Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel
The accidental deletion of a data-structure sentinel can cause serious programming logic problems.
Often times data-structure sentinels are used to mark structure of the data structure. A common example of this is the null character at the end of strings. Another common example is linked lists which may contain a sentinel to mark the end of the list. It is dangerous to allow this type of control data to be easily accessible. Therefore, it is important to protect from the deletion or modification outside of some wrapper interface which provides safety.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This example creates a null terminated string and prints it contents. The string foo has space for 9 characters and a null terminator, but 10 characters are written to it. As a result, the string foo is not null terminated and calling printf() on it will have unpredictable and possibly dangerous results.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.
- Build and Compilation: Run or compile the software using features or extensions that automatically provide a protection mechanism that mitigates or eliminates buffer overflows. For example, certain compilers and extensions provide automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are built into the compiled code. Examples include the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice.
- Operation: Use OS-level preventative functionality. Not a complete solution.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.