CWE-617: Reachable Assertion | Glexia
CWE-617 (Reachable Assertion) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-617: assertion failure
Reachable Assertion represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart: An attacker that can trigger an assert statement can still lead to a denial of service if the relevant code can be triggered by an attacker, and if the scope of the assert() extends beyond the attacker's own session.
Developer Pattern
CWE-617 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-617, 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-617: Reachable Assertion
The product contains an assert() or similar statement that can be triggered by an attacker, which leads to an application exit or other behavior that is more severe than necessary.
While assertion is good for catching logic errors and reducing the chances of reaching more serious vulnerability conditions, it can still lead to a denial of service. For example, if a server handles multiple simultaneous connections, and an assert() occurs in one single connection that causes all other connections to be dropped, this is a reachable assertion that leads to a denial of service.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the excerpt below, an AssertionError (an unchecked exception) is thrown if the user hasn't entered an email address in an HTML form.
Remediation
- Implementation: Make sensitive open/close operation non reachable by directly user-controlled data (e.g. open/close resources)
- Implementation: Perform input validation on user data.
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.