CWE-824: Access of Uninitialized Pointer | Glexia
CWE-824 (Access of Uninitialized Pointer) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-824: Access of Uninitialized Pointer
Access of Uninitialized Pointer represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Memory: If the uninitialized pointer is used in a read operation, an attacker might be able to read sensitive portions of memory.
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart: If the uninitialized pointer references a memory location that is not accessible to the product, or points to a location that is "malformed" (such as NULL) or larger than expected by a read or write operation, then a crash may occur.
- Integrity Confidentiality Availability: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands: If the uninitialized pointer is used in a function call, or points to unexpected data in a write operation, then code execution may be possible.
Developer Pattern
CWE-824 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-824, 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-824: Access of Uninitialized Pointer
The product accesses or uses a pointer that has not been initialized.
If the pointer contains an uninitialized value, then the value might not point to a valid memory location. This could cause the product to read from or write to unexpected memory locations, leading to a denial of service. If the uninitialized pointer is used as a function call, then arbitrary functions could be invoked. If an attacker can influence the portion of uninitialized memory that is contained in the pointer, this weakness could be leveraged to execute code or perform other attacks. Depending on memory layout, associated memory management behaviors, and product operation, the attacker might be able to influence the contents of the uninitialized pointer, thus gaining more fine-grained control of the memory location to be accessed.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
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.)
- Automated Dynamic Analysis: Use tools that are integrated during compilation to insert runtime error-checking mechanisms related to memory safety errors, such as AddressSanitizer (ASan) for C/C++ [REF-1518].
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
No related CWE relationships are published yet.
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.