CWE-468: Incorrect Pointer Scaling | Glexia
CWE-468 (Incorrect Pointer Scaling) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-468: Incorrect Pointer Scaling
Incorrect Pointer Scaling represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Integrity: Read Memory,Modify Memory: Incorrect pointer scaling will often result in buffer overflow conditions. Confidentiality can be compromised if the weakness is in the context of a buffer over-read or under-read.
Developer Pattern
CWE-468 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-468, 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-468: Incorrect Pointer Scaling
In C and C++, one may often accidentally refer to the wrong memory due to the semantics of when math operations are implicitly scaled.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This example attempts to calculate the position of the second byte of a pointer. In this example, second_char is intended to point to the second byte of p. But, adding 1 to p actually adds sizeof(int) to p, giving a result that is incorrect (3 bytes off on 32-bit platforms). If the resulting memory address is read, this could potentially be an information leak. If it is a write, it could be a security-critical write to unauthorized memory-- whether or not it is a buffer overflow. Note that the above code may also be wrong in other ways, particularly in a little endian environment.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use a platform with high-level memory abstractions.
- Implementation: Always use array indexing instead of direct pointer manipulation.
- Architecture and Design: Use technologies for preventing buffer overflows.
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.