CWE-547: Use of Hard-coded, Security-relevant Constants | Glexia
CWE-547 (Use of Hard-coded, Security-relevant Constants) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-547: Use of Hard-coded, Security-relevant Constants
Use of Hard-coded, Security-relevant Constants represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context,Quality Degradation,Reduce Maintainability: The existence of hardcoded constants could cause unexpected behavior and the introduction of weaknesses during code maintenance or when making changes to the code if all occurrences are not modified. The use of hardcoded constants is an indication of poor quality.
Developer Pattern
CWE-547 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-547, 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-547: Use of Hard-coded, Security-relevant Constants
The product uses hard-coded constants instead of symbolic names for security-critical values, which increases the likelihood of mistakes during code maintenance or security policy change.
If the developer does not find all occurrences of the hard-coded constants, an incorrect policy decision may be made if one of the constants is not changed. Making changes to these values will require code changes that may be difficult or impossible once the system is released to the field. In addition, these hard-coded values may become available to attackers if the code is ever disclosed.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The usage of symbolic names instead of hard-coded constants is preferred. The following is an example of using a hard-coded constant instead of a symbolic name.,If the buffer value needs to be changed, then it has to be altered in more than one place. If the developer forgets or does not find all occurrences, in this example it could lead to a buffer overflow.,In this example the developer will only need to change one value and all references to the buffer size are updated, as a symbolic name is used instead of a hard-coded constant.
Remediation
- Implementation: Avoid using hard-coded constants. Configuration files offer a more flexible solution.
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.