CWE-608: Struts: Non-private Field in ActionForm Class | Glexia
CWE-608 (Struts: Non-private Field in ActionForm Class) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-608: Struts: Non-private Field in ActionForm Class
Struts: Non-private Field in ActionForm Class represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Confidentiality: Modify Application Data,Read Application Data
Developer Pattern
CWE-608 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-608, 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-608: Struts: Non-private Field in ActionForm Class
An ActionForm class contains a field that has not been declared private, which can be accessed without using a setter or getter.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following Java example the class RegistrationForm is a Struts framework ActionForm Bean that will maintain user input data from a registration webpage for a online business site. The user will enter registration data and through the Struts framework the RegistrationForm bean will maintain the user data. However, within the RegistrationForm the member variables for the registration form input data are declared public not private. All member variables within a Struts framework ActionForm class must be declared private to prevent the member variables from being modified without using the getter and setter methods. The following example shows the member variables being declared private and getter and setter methods declared for accessing the member variables.
Remediation
- Implementation: Make all fields private. Use getter to get the value of the field. Setter should be used only by the framework; setting an action form field from other actions is bad practice and should be avoided.
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.