The program calls a function that can never be guaranteed to
work safely.
Extended Description
Certain functions behave in dangerous ways regardless of how they are
used. Functions in this category were often implemented without taking
security concerns into account. The gets() function is unsafe because it
does not perform bounds checking on the size of its input. An attacker can
easily send arbitrarily-sized input to gets() and overflow the destination
buffer. Similarly, the >> operator is unsafe to use when
reading into a statically-allocated character array because it does not
perform bounds checking on the size of its input. An attacker can easily
send arbitrarily-sized input to the >> operator and overflow
the destination buffer.
Time of Introduction
Implementation
Applicable Platforms
Languages
C
C++
Likelihood of Exploit
High
Demonstrative Examples
Example 1
The excerpt below calls the gets() function in C, which is
inherently unsafe.
(Bad Code)
C
char buf[BUFSIZE];
gets(buf);
Potential Mitigations
Phase
Description
Ban the use of dangerous function. Use their safe equivalent.
Use grep or static analysis tools to spot usage of dangerous
functions.
Weakness Ordinalities
Ordinality
Description
Primary
(where the
weakness exists independent of other weaknesses)
Description
