CWE-128: Wrap-around Error
Description
Wrap around errors occur whenever a value is incremented past the maximum value for its type and therefore wraps around to a very small, negative, or undefined value.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Medium
- Status
- Incomplete
Common consequences
- Availability
DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory); DoS: Instability
This weakness will generally lead to undefined behavior and therefore crashes. In the case of overflows involving loop index variables, the likelihood of infinite loops is also high.
- Integrity
Modify Memory
If the value in question is important to data (as opposed to flow), simple data corruption has occurred. Also, if the wrap around results in other conditions such as buffer overflows, further memory corruption may occur.
- ConfidentialityAvailabilityAccess Control
Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands; Bypass Protection Mechanism
This weakness can sometimes trigger buffer overflows which can be used to execute arbitrary code. This is usually outside the scope of a program's implicit security policy.
Potential mitigations
Requirements specification: The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
- Architecture and Design
Provide clear upper and lower bounds on the scale of any protocols designed.
- Implementation
Perform validation on all incremented variables to ensure that they remain within reasonable bounds.