CWE-575: EJB Bad Practices: Use of AWT Swing
Official CWE-575 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-575: EJB Bad Practices: Use of AWT Swing
EJB Bad Practices: Use of AWT Swing represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Quality Degradation
Developer Pattern
CWE-575 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-575, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-575: EJB Bad Practices: Use of AWT Swing
The product violates the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification by using AWT/Swing.
The Enterprise JavaBeans specification requires that every bean provider follow a set of programming guidelines designed to ensure that the bean will be portable and behave consistently in any EJB container. In this case, the product violates the following EJB guideline: "An enterprise bean must not use the AWT functionality to attempt to output information to a display, or to input information from a keyboard." The specification justifies this requirement in the following way: "Most servers do not allow direct interaction between an application program and a keyboard/display attached to the server system."
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following Java example is a simple converter class for converting US dollars to Yen. This converter class demonstrates the improper practice of using a stateless session Enterprise JavaBean that implements an AWT Component and AWT keyboard event listener to retrieve keyboard input from the user for the amount of the US dollars to convert to Yen. This use of the AWT and Swing APIs within any kind of Enterprise JavaBean not only violates the restriction of the EJB specification against using AWT or Swing within an EJB but also violates the intended use of Enterprise JavaBeans to separate business logic from presentation logic.,The Stateless Session Enterprise JavaBean should contain only business logic. Presentation logic should be provided by some other mechanism such as Servlets or Java Server Pages (JSP) as in the following Java/JSP example.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Do not use AWT/Swing when writing EJBs.
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.