COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-1164

Irrelevant Code

The product contains code that is not essential for execution, i.e. makes no state changes and has no side effects that alter data or control flow, such that removal of the code would have no impact to functionality or correctness.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product contains code that is not essential for execution, i.e. makes no state changes and has no side effects that alter data or control flow, such that removal of the code would have no impact to functionality or correctness.

Extended description

Irrelevant code could include dead code, initialization that is not used, empty blocks, code that could be entirely removed due to optimization, etc.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Reduce Reliability

Affected security scopes: Other

Reduce Performance

Affected security scopes: Other

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.)