CWE-397: Declaration of Throws for Generic Exception
Description
The product throws or raises an overly broad exceptions that can hide important details and produce inappropriate responses to certain conditions.
Declaring a method to throw Exception or Throwable promotes generic error handling procedures that make it difficult for callers to perform proper error handling and error recovery. For example, Java's exception mechanism makes it easy for callers to anticipate what can go wrong and write code to handle each specific exceptional circumstance. Declaring that a method throws a generic form of exception defeats this system.
- 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; Alter Execution Logic
Throwing 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.