CWE-500: Public Static Field Not Marked Final | Glexia
CWE-500 (Public Static Field Not Marked Final) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-500: Public Static Field Not Marked Final
Public Static Field Not Marked Final 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 object could potentially be tampered with.
- Confidentiality: Read Application Data: The object could potentially allow the object to be read.
Developer Pattern
CWE-500 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-500, 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-500: Public Static Field Not Marked Final
An object contains a public static field that is not marked final, which might allow it to be modified in unexpected ways.
Public static variables can be read without an accessor and changed without a mutator by any classes in the application.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following examples use of a public static String variable to contain the name of a property/configuration file for the application. Having a public static variable that is not marked final (constant) may allow the variable to the altered in a way not intended by the application. In this example the String variable can be modified to indicate a different on nonexistent properties file which could cause the application to crash or caused unexpected behavior.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Clearly identify the scope for all critical data elements, including whether they should be regarded as static.
- Implementation:
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.