CWE-495: Private Data Structure Returned From A Public… | Glexia
CWE-495 (Private Data Structure Returned From A Public Method) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-495: Private Data Structure Returned From A Public Method
Private Data Structure Returned From A Public Method represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Modify Application Data: The contents of the data structure can be modified from outside the intended scope.
Developer Pattern
CWE-495 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-495, 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-495: Private Data Structure Returned From A Public Method
The product has a method that is declared public, but returns a reference to a private data structure, which could then be modified in unexpected ways.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Here, a public method in a Java class returns a reference to a private array. Given that arrays in Java are mutable, any modifications made to the returned reference would be reflected in the original private array.
- In this example, the Color class defines functions that return non-const references to private members (an array type and an integer type), which are then arbitrarily altered from outside the control of the class.
Remediation
- Implementation: Declare the method private.
- Implementation: Clone the member data and keep an unmodified version of the data private to the object.
- Implementation: Use public setter methods that govern how a private member can be modified.
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.