CWE-546: Suspicious Comment
Official CWE-546 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-546: Suspicious Comment
Suspicious Comment represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Quality Degradation: Suspicious comments could be an indication that there are problems in the source code that may need to be fixed and is an indication of poor quality. This could lead to further bugs and the introduction of weaknesses.
Developer Pattern
CWE-546 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-546, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-546: Suspicious Comment
The code contains comments that suggest the presence of bugs, incomplete functionality, or weaknesses.
Many suspicious comments, such as BUG, HACK, FIXME, LATER, LATER2, TODO, in the code indicate missing security functionality and checking. Others indicate code problems that programmers should fix, such as hard-coded variables, error handling, not using stored procedures, and performance issues.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following excerpt demonstrates the use of a suspicious comment in an incomplete code block that may have security repercussions.
Remediation
- Documentation: Remove comments that suggest the presence of bugs, incomplete functionality, or weaknesses, before deploying the application.
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.