CWE-573: Improper Following of Specification by Caller
Official CWE-573 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-573: Improper Following of Specification by Caller
Improper Following of Specification by Caller represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Quality Degradation,Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-573 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-573, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-573: Improper Following of Specification by Caller
The product does not follow or incorrectly follows the specifications as required by the implementation language, environment, framework, protocol, or platform.
When leveraging external functionality, such as an API, it is important that the caller does so in accordance with the requirements of the external functionality or else unintended behaviors may result, possibly leaving the system vulnerable to any number of exploits.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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
- CWE-103: Struts: Incomplete validate() Method Definition
- CWE-104: Struts: Form Bean Does Not Extend Validation Class
- CWE-243: Creation of chroot Jail Without Changing Working Directory
- CWE-253: Incorrect Check of Function Return Value
- CWE-296: Improper Following of a Certificate's Chain of Trust
- CWE-304: Missing Critical Step in Authentication
- CWE-325: Missing Cryptographic Step
- CWE-329: Generation of Predictable IV with CBC Mode
- CWE-358: Improperly Implemented Security Check for Standard
- CWE-475: Undefined Behavior for Input to API
- CWE-568: finalize() Method Without super.finalize()
- CWE-710: Improper Adherence to Coding Standards
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.