BaseIncomplete

CWE-463Deletion of Data Structure Sentinel

Category: other

Description

The accidental deletion of a data-structure sentinel can cause serious programming logic problems. Often times data-structure sentinels are used to mark structure of the data structure. A common example of this is the null character at the end of strings. Another common example is linked lists which may contain a sentinel to mark the end of the list. It is dangerous to allow this type of control data to be easily accessible. Therefore, it is important to protect from the deletion or modification outside of some wrapper interface which provides safety.

Common consequences· 2

  • Availability / Other — Other
    Generally this error will cause the data structure to not work properly.
  • Authorization / Other — Other
    If a control character, such as NULL is removed, one may cause resource access control problems.

Potential mitigations· 3

  • [Architecture and Design]Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.
  • [Build and Compilation]
  • [Operation]Use OS-level preventative functionality. Not a complete solution.

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/463.html

Related by meaning· 6

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

CWE
Addition of Data Structure Sentinel
CWE
Improper Null Termination
CWE
Compiler Removal of Code to Clear Buffers
CWE
DEPRECATED: Miscalculated Null Termination
CWE
Use of NullPointerException Catch to Detect NULL Pointer Dereference
CWE
Failure to Handle Missing Parameter
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.