COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-1076

Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions

The product's architecture, source code, design, documentation, or other artifact does not follow required conventions.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product's architecture, source code, design, documentation, or other artifact does not follow required conventions.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Lifecycle phase

Documentation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Reduce Maintainability

Affected security scopes: Other

This issue makes it more difficult to maintain the product, which indirectly affects security by making it more difficult or time-consuming to find and/or fix vulnerabilities. It also might make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities.

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.

Verification

How is it detected?

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.)