CWE-396: Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception
Description
Catching overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.
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.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Status
- Draft
Common consequences
- Non-RepudiationOther
Hide Activities
A generic exception can hide details about unexpected adversary activities by making it difficult to properly troubleshoot error conditions during execution.
Related weaknesses
CAPEC attack patterns that exploit it
CWE 4.20 links no CAPEC attack pattern to this weakness.