COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-396

Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception

Catching overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

Catching overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.

Extended description

Multiple catch blocks can get ugly and repetitive, but "condensing" catch blocks by catching a high-level class like Exception can obscure exceptions that deserve special treatment or that should not be caught at this point in the program. Catching an overly broad exception essentially defeats the purpose of a language's typed exceptions, and can become particularly dangerous if the program grows and begins to throw new types of exceptions. The new exception types will not receive any attention.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Hide Activities

Affected security scopes: Non-Repudiation, Other

A generic exception can hide details about unexpected adversary activities by making it difficult to properly troubleshoot error conditions during execution.

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

High
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.)
CWE-396: Common Weakness Enumeration Entry CWE-396 · DayBreach