CWE-487: Reliance on Package-level Scope | Glexia
CWE-487 (Reliance on Package-level Scope) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-487: Reliance on Package-level Scope
Reliance on Package-level Scope represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Application Data: Any data in a Java package can be accessed outside of the Java framework if the package is distributed.
- Integrity: Modify Application Data: The data in a Java class can be modified by anyone outside of the Java framework if the package is distributed.
Developer Pattern
CWE-487 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-487, 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-487: Reliance on Package-level Scope
Java packages are not inherently closed; therefore, relying on them for code security is not a good practice.
The purpose of package scope is to prevent accidental access by other parts of a program. This is an ease-of-software-development feature but not a security feature.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design,Implementation: Data should be private static and final whenever possible. This will assure that your code is protected by instantiating early, preventing access and tampering.
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.