CWE-705: Incorrect Control Flow Scoping
Official CWE-705 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-705: Incorrect Control Flow Scoping
Incorrect Control Flow Scoping represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Alter Execution Logic,Other
Developer Pattern
CWE-705 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-705, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-705: Incorrect Control Flow Scoping
The product does not properly return control flow to the proper location after it has completed a task or detected an unusual condition.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example attempts to resolve a hostname. A DNS lookup failure will cause the Servlet to throw an exception.
- This code queries a server and displays its status when a request comes from an authorized IP address. This code redirects unauthorized users, but continues to execute code after calling http_redirect(). This means even unauthorized users may be able to access the contents of the page or perform a DoS attack on the server being queried. Also, note that this code is vulnerable to an IP address spoofing attack (CWE-212).
- Included in the doPost() method defined below is a call to System.exit() in the event of a specific exception.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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
- CWE-248: Uncaught Exception
- CWE-382: J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit()
- CWE-395: Use of NullPointerException Catch to Detect NULL Pointer Dereference
- CWE-396: Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception
- CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
- CWE-455: Non-exit on Failed Initialization
- CWE-584: Return Inside Finally Block
- CWE-617: Reachable Assertion
- CWE-698: Execution After Redirect (EAR)
- CWE-691: Insufficient Control Flow Management
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.