CWE-457Use of Uninitialized Variable

Description

Common consequences· 2

• Availability / Integrity / Other — Other
  Initial variables usually contain junk, which can not be trusted for consistency. This can lead to denial of service conditions, or modify control flow in unexpected ways. In some cases, an attacker can "pre-initialize" the variable using previous actions, which might enable code execution. This can cause a race condition if a lock variable check passes when it should not.
• Authorization / Other — Other
  Strings that are not initialized are especially dangerous, since many functions expect a null at the end -- and only at the end -- of a string.

Potential mitigations· 5

• [Implementation]Ensure that critical variables are initialized before first use [REF-1485].
• [Build and Compilation]Most compilers will complain about the use of uninitialized variables if warnings are turned on.
• [Implementation, Operation]When using a language that does not require explicit declaration of variables, run or compile the software in a mode that reports undeclared or unknown variables. This may indicate the presence of a typographic error in the variable's name.
• [Requirements]Choose a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
• [Architecture and Design]Mitigating technologies such as safe string libraries and container abstractions could be introduced.

(incoming)10

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.