COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-1038

Insecure Automated Optimizations

The product uses a mechanism that automatically optimizes code, e.g. to improve a characteristic such as performance, but the optimizations can have an unintended side effect that might violate an intended security assumption.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Low

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product uses a mechanism that automatically optimizes code, e.g. to improve a characteristic such as performance, but the optimizations can have an unintended side effect that might violate an intended security assumption.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Optimizations built into the design of a product can have unintended consequences during execution.

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Alter Execution Logic

Affected security scopes: Integrity

The optimizations alter the order of execution resulting in side effects that were not intended by the original developer.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

  • Follow secure coding guidelines for input handling and boundary checking.
  • Enforce strict security reviews and automated static analysis (SAST) checks.