COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-573

Improper Following of Specification by Caller

The product does not follow or incorrectly follows the specifications as required by the implementation language, environment, framework, protocol, or platform.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product does not follow or incorrectly follows the specifications as required by the implementation language, environment, framework, protocol, or platform.

Extended description

When leveraging external functionality, such as an API, it is important that the caller does so in accordance with the requirements of the external functionality or else unintended behaviors may result, possibly leaving the system vulnerable to any number of exploits.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Quality DegradationVaries by Context

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.)