CWE-771: Missing Reference to Active Allocated Resource
Official CWE-771 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-771: Missing Reference to Active Allocated Resource
Missing Reference to Active Allocated Resource represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Resource Consumption (Other): An attacker that can influence the allocation of resources that are not properly maintained could deplete the available resource pool and prevent all other processes from accessing the same type of resource.
Developer Pattern
CWE-771 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-771, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-771: Missing Reference to Active Allocated Resource
The product does not properly maintain a reference to a resource that has been allocated, which prevents the resource from being reclaimed.
This does not necessarily apply in languages or frameworks that automatically perform garbage collection, since the removal of all references may act as a signal that the resource is ready to be reclaimed.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Operation,Architecture and Design: [object Object]
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.