CWE-584: Return Inside Finally Block
Official CWE-584 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-584: Return Inside Finally Block
Return Inside Finally Block represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Alter Execution Logic
Developer Pattern
CWE-584 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-584, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-584: Return Inside Finally Block
The code has a return statement inside a finally block, which will cause any thrown exception in the try block to be discarded.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following code excerpt, the IllegalArgumentException will never be delivered to the caller. The finally block will cause the exception to be discarded.
Remediation
- Implementation: Do not use a return statement inside the finally block. The finally block should have "cleanup" code.
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.