Use of Uninitialized Resource

Opis

The product uses or accesses a resource that has not been initialized.

When a resource has not been properly initialized, the product may behave unexpectedly. This may lead to a crash or invalid memory access, but the consequences vary depending on the type of resource and how it is used within the product.

Skutki

• Confidentiality

  Read Memory; Read Application Data

  When reusing a resource such as memory or a program variable, the original contents of that resource may not be cleared before it is sent to an untrusted party.

• Availability

  DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

  The uninitialized resource may contain values that cause program flow to change in ways that the programmer did not intend.

Zapobieganie

• Implementation

  Explicitly initialize the resource before use. If this is performed through an API function or standard procedure, follow all required steps.

• Implementation

  Pay close attention to complex conditionals that affect initialization, since some branches might not perform the initialization.

• Implementation

  Avoid race conditions (CWE-362) during initialization routines.

• Build and Compilation

  Run or compile the product with settings that generate warnings about uninitialized variables or data.

Przykłady podatności

• CVE-2019-9805 Chain: Creation of the packet client occurs before initialization is complete (CWE-696) resulting in a read from uninitialized memory (CWE-908), causing memory corruption.
• CVE-2008-4197 Use of uninitialized memory may allow code execution.
• CVE-2008-2934 Free of an uninitialized pointer leads to crash and possible code execution.
• CVE-2008-0063 Product does not clear memory contents when generating an error message, leading to information leak.
• CVE-2008-0062 Lack of initialization triggers NULL pointer dereference or double-free.
• CVE-2008-0081 Uninitialized variable leads to code execution in popular desktop application.
• CVE-2008-3688 Chain: Uninitialized variable leads to infinite loop.
• CVE-2008-3475 Chain: Improper initialization leads to memory corruption.
• CVE-2005-1036 Chain: Bypass of access restrictions due to improper authorization (CWE-862) of a user results from an improperly initialized (CWE-909) I/O permission bitmap
• CVE-2008-3597 Chain: game server can access player data structures before initialization has happened leading to NULL dereference
• CVE-2009-2692 Chain: Use of an unimplemented network socket operation pointing to an uninitialized handler function (CWE-456) causes a crash because of a null pointer dereference (CWE-476)
• CVE-2009-0949 Chain: improper initialization of memory can lead to NULL dereference
• CVE-2009-3620 Chain: some unprivileged ioctls do not verify that a structure has been initialized before invocation, leading to NULL dereference

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-665 Improper Initialization

Słabości podrzędne

• CWE-457 Use of Uninitialized Variable

Kiedy powstaje

• Implementation

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific

Źródła

1. Exploiting Uninitialized Data — mercy, 2006