CWE-455: Non-exit on Failed Initialization
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Edit Custom FilterThe product does not exit or otherwise modify its operation when security-relevant errors occur during initialization, such as when a configuration file has a format error or a hardware security module (HSM) cannot be activated, which can cause the product to execute in a less secure fashion than intended by the administrator.
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![]() Languages Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence) Example 1 The following code intends to limit certain operations to the administrator only. (bad code)
Example Language: Perl
$username = GetCurrentUser();
$state = GetStateData($username); if (defined($state)) { $uid = ExtractUserID($state); }# do stuff if ($uid == 0) { DoAdminThings(); }If the application is unable to extract the state information - say, due to a database timeout - then the $uid variable will not be explicitly set by the programmer. This will cause $uid to be regarded as equivalent to "0" in the conditional, allowing the original user to perform administrator actions. Even if the attacker cannot directly influence the state data, unexpected errors could cause incorrect privileges to be assigned to a user just by accident.
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Research Gap
Under-studied. These issues are not frequently reported, and it is difficult to find published examples.
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