CWE-1086: Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes
Learn about CWE-1086 (Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes), its security impact, exploitation methods, and prevention guidelines.
What is Class with Excessive Number of Child Classes?
• Overview: A class with an excessive number of child classes is a design issue where a single class serves as a parent to too many subclasses, making the system complex and difficult to manage. This can hinder the understanding and maintenance of the code, indirectly impacting security by complicating the identification and resolution of vulnerabilities.
• Exploitation Methods:
- Attackers may exploit the complexity to hide malicious code or vulnerabilities that are harder to detect due to the convoluted class hierarchy.
- Common attack patterns include taking advantage of overlooked inheritance bugs or vulnerabilities in specific child classes that are not easily traceable.
• Security Impact:
- Direct consequences include increased difficulty in code auditing and vulnerability detection, potentially allowing vulnerabilities to remain undetected.
- Potential cascading effects may involve introducing security issues or bugs as developers struggle to maintain or modify the code effectively.
- Business impact can include increased costs and time for maintenance and vulnerability management, as well as potential security breaches due to overlooked vulnerabilities.
• Prevention Guidelines:
- Specific code-level fixes include refactoring the class hierarchy to limit the number of child classes, possibly by re-evaluating the design and employing design patterns like composition over inheritance.
- Security best practices involve regular code reviews and adherence to design principles that promote simplicity and clear class responsibilities.
- Recommended tools and frameworks include static analysis tools to identify complex class hierarchies and metrics tools that provide insights into class dependencies and design complexity.
Technical Details
Likelihood of Exploit: Not specified
Affected Languages: Not specified
Affected Technologies: Not specified