Categories

The software reads from a buffer using buffer access mechanisms such as indexes or pointers that reference memory locations after the targeted buffer.

The software does not properly encode or decode the data, resulting in unexpected values.

Any condition where the attacker has the ability to write an arbitrary value to an arbitrary location, often as the result of a buffer overflow.

The product places sensitive information into files or directories that are accessible to actors who are allowed to have access to the files, but not to the sensitive information.

This category represents one of the phyla in the Seven Pernicious Kingdoms vulnerability classification. It includes weaknesses related to the improper management of time and state in an environment that supports simultaneous or near-simultaneous computation by multiple systems, processes, or threads. According to the authors of the Seven Pernicious Kingdoms, "Distributed computation is about time and state. That is, in order for more than one component to communicate, state must be shared, and all that takes time. Most programmers anthropomorphize their work. They think about one thread of control carrying out the entire program in the same way they would if they had to do the job themselves. Modern computers, however, switch between tasks very quickly, and in multi-core, multi-CPU, or distributed systems, two events may take place at exactly the same time. Defects rush to fill the gap between the programmer's model of how a program executes and what happens in reality. These defects are related to unexpected interactions between threads, processes, time, and information. These interactions happen through shared state: semaphores, variables, the file system, and, basically, anything that can store information."

The lack of entropy available for, or used by, a Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) can be a stability and security threat.

The software uses or specifies an encoding when generating output to a downstream component, but the specified encoding is not the same as the encoding that is expected by the downstream component.

Weaknesses in this category are typically introduced during the configuration of the software.

The software provides an Applications Programming Interface (API) or similar interface for interaction with external actors, but the interface includes a dangerous method or function that is not properly restricted.

The software uses external input to construct a pathname that should be within a restricted directory, but it does not properly neutralize absolute path sequences such as /abs/path that can resolve to a location that is outside of that directory.