CWE-588: Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer
Official CWE-588 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-588: Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer
Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Modify Memory: Adjacent variables in memory may be corrupted by assignments performed on fields after the cast.
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart: Execution may end due to a memory access error.
Developer Pattern
CWE-588 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-588, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-588: Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer
Casting a non-structure type to a structure type and accessing a field can lead to memory access errors or data corruption.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness.
Remediation
- Requirements: The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
- Implementation: Review of type casting operations can identify locations where incompatible types are cast.
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.