CWE-498: Cloneable Class Containing Sensitive Information | Glexia
CWE-498 (Cloneable Class Containing Sensitive Information) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-498: Cloneable Class Containing Sensitive Information
Cloneable Class Containing Sensitive Information represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism: A class that can be cloned can be produced without executing the constructor. This is dangerous since the constructor may perform security-related checks. By allowing the object to be cloned, those checks may be bypassed.
Developer Pattern
CWE-498 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-498, 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-498: Cloneable Class Containing Sensitive Information
The code contains a class with sensitive data, but the class is cloneable. The data can then be accessed by cloning the class.
Cloneable classes are effectively open classes, since data cannot be hidden in them. Classes that do not explicitly deny cloning can be cloned by any other class without running the constructor.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness. Make classes uncloneable by defining a clone function like:
Remediation
- Implementation: If you do make your classes clonable, ensure that your clone method is final and throw super.clone().
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.