CWE-589: Call to Non-ubiquitous API | Glexia
CWE-589 (Call to Non-ubiquitous API) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-589: Call to Non-ubiquitous API
Call to Non-ubiquitous API 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-589 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-589, 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-589: Call to Non-ubiquitous API
The product uses an API function that does not exist on all versions of the target platform. This could cause portability problems or inconsistencies that allow denial of service or other consequences.
Some functions that offer security features supported by the OS are not available on all versions of the OS in common use. Likewise, functions are often deprecated or made obsolete for security reasons and should not be used.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Implementation: Always test your code on any platform on which it is targeted to run on.
- Testing: Test your code on the newest and oldest platform on which it is targeted to run on.
- Testing: Develop a system to test for API functions that are not portable.
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.