COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-582

Array Declared Public, Final, and Static

The product declares an array public, final, and static, which is not sufficient to prevent the array's contents from being modified.

Abstraction

Variant

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product declares an array public, final, and static, which is not sufficient to prevent the array's contents from being modified.

Extended description

Because arrays are mutable objects, the final constraint requires that the array object itself be assigned only once, but makes no guarantees about the values of the array elements. Since the array is public, a malicious program can change the values stored in the array. As such, in most cases an array declared public, final and static is a bug.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Mobile code, in this case a Java Applet, is code that is transmitted across a network and executed on a remote machine. Because mobile code developers have little if any control of the environment in which their code will execute, special security concerns become relevant. One of the biggest environmental threats results from the risk that the mobile code will run side-by-side with other, potentially malicious, mobile code. Because all of the popular web browsers execute code from multiple sources together in the same JVM, many of the security guidelines for mobile code are focused on preventing manipulation of your objects' state and behavior by adversaries who have access to the same virtual machine where your product is running.

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Modify Application Data

Affected security scopes: Integrity

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Implementation

Implementation-phase defence

Detail
In most situations the array should be made private.

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.)