CWE-578: EJB Bad Practices: Use of Class Loader | Glexia
CWE-578 (EJB Bad Practices: Use of Class Loader) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-578: EJB Bad Practices: Use of Class Loader
EJB Bad Practices: Use of Class Loader represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Integrity,Availability,Other: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands,Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-578 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-578, 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-578: EJB Bad Practices: Use of Class Loader
The product violates the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification by using the class loader.
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: "The enterprise bean must not attempt to create a class loader; obtain the current class loader; set the context class loader; set security manager; create a new security manager; stop the JVM; or change the input, output, and error streams." The specification justifies this requirement in the following way: "These functions are reserved for the EJB container. Allowing the enterprise bean to use these functions could compromise security and decrease the container's ability to properly manage the runtime environment."
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following Java example is a simple stateless Enterprise JavaBean that retrieves the interest rate for the number of points for a mortgage. The interest rates for various points are retrieved from an XML document on the local file system, and the EJB uses the Class Loader for the EJB class to obtain the XML document from the local file system as an input stream. This use of the Java Class Loader class within any kind of Enterprise JavaBean violates the restriction of the EJB specification against obtaining the current class loader as this could compromise the security of the application using the EJB.
- An EJB is also restricted from creating a custom class loader and creating a class and instance of a class from the class loader, as shown in the following example.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design,Implementation: Do not use the Class Loader when writing EJBs.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.