CWE-544: Missing Standardized Error Handling Mechanism
Official CWE-544 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-544: Missing Standardized Error Handling Mechanism
Missing Standardized Error Handling Mechanism represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Other: Quality Degradation,Unexpected State,Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-544 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-544, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-544: Missing Standardized Error Handling Mechanism
The product does not use a standardized method for handling errors throughout the code, which might introduce inconsistent error handling and resultant weaknesses.
If the product handles error messages individually, on a one-by-one basis, this is likely to result in inconsistent error handling. The causes of errors may be lost. Also, detailed information about the causes of an error may be unintentionally returned to the user.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: define a strategy for handling errors of different severities, such as fatal errors versus basic log events. Use or create built-in language features, or an external package, that provides an easy-to-use API and define coding standards for the detection and handling of errors.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.