CWE-482: Comparing instead of Assigning
Official CWE-482 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-482: Comparing instead of Assigning
Comparing instead of Assigning represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability,Integrity: Unexpected State: The assignment will not take place, which should cause obvious program execution problems.
Developer Pattern
CWE-482 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.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-482, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-482: Comparing instead of Assigning
The code uses an operator for comparison when the intention was to perform an assignment.
In many languages, the compare statement is very close in appearance to the assignment statement; they are often confused.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness.
- The following C/C++ example shows a simple implementation of a stack that includes methods for adding and removing integer values from the stack. The example uses pointers to add and remove integer values to the stack array variable. The push method includes an expression to assign the integer value to the location in the stack pointed to by the pointer variable.,However, this expression uses the comparison operator "==" rather than the assignment operator "=". The result of using the comparison operator instead of the assignment operator causes erroneous values to be entered into the stack and can cause unexpected results.
Remediation
- Testing: Many IDEs and static analysis products will detect this problem.
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.)
- Automated Static Analysis - Source Code: An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or linter can report or highlight this weaknesses.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.