CWE-579: J2EE Bad Practices: Non-serializable Object… | Glexia
CWE-579 (J2EE Bad Practices: Non-serializable Object Stored in Session) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-579: J2EE Bad Practices: Non-serializable Object Stored in Session
J2EE Bad Practices: Non-serializable Object Stored in Session 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-579 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-579, 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-579: J2EE Bad Practices: Non-serializable Object Stored in Session
The product stores a non-serializable object as an HttpSession attribute, which can hurt reliability.
A J2EE application can make use of multiple JVMs in order to improve application reliability and performance. In order to make the multiple JVMs appear as a single application to the end user, the J2EE container can replicate an HttpSession object across multiple JVMs so that if one JVM becomes unavailable another can step in and take its place without disrupting the flow of the application. This is only possible if all session data is serializable, allowing the session to be duplicated between the JVMs.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following class adds itself to the session, but because it is not serializable, the session can no longer be replicated.
Remediation
- Implementation: In order for session replication to work, the values the product stores as attributes in the session must implement the Serializable interface.
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.