CWE-240: Improper Handling of Inconsistent Structural Elements
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Edit Custom FilterThe product does not handle or incorrectly handles when two or more structural elements should be consistent, but are not.
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![]() Languages Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence) Example 1 In the following C/C++ example the method processMessageFromSocket() will get a message from a socket, placed into a buffer, and will parse the contents of the buffer into a structure that contains the message length and the message body. A for loop is used to copy the message body into a local character string which will be passed to another method for processing. (bad code)
Example Language: C
int processMessageFromSocket(int socket) {
int success;
char buffer[BUFFER_SIZE]; char message[MESSAGE_SIZE]; // get message from socket and store into buffer //Ignoring possibliity that buffer > BUFFER_SIZE if (getMessage(socket, buffer, BUFFER_SIZE) > 0) { // place contents of the buffer into message structure ExMessage *msg = recastBuffer(buffer); // copy message body into string for processing int index; for (index = 0; index < msg->msgLength; index++) { message[index] = msg->msgBody[index]; }message[index] = '\0'; // process message success = processMessage(message); return success; However, the message length variable from the structure is used as the condition for ending the for loop without validating that the message length variable accurately reflects the length of the message body (CWE-606). This can result in a buffer over-read (CWE-125) by reading from memory beyond the bounds of the buffer if the message length variable indicates a length that is longer than the size of a message body (CWE-130).
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