CWE-758: Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior

What is Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior?

• Overview: Reliance on Undefined, Unspecified, or Implementation-Defined Behavior (CWE-758) occurs when software depends on behaviors that are not explicitly guaranteed across different environments or implementations, leading to unpredictable outcomes.

• Exploitation Methods:

• Attackers can exploit this by introducing subtle changes or inputs that behave differently under diverse implementations.
• Common attack patterns include targeting inconsistencies when software is ported to different platforms or when interacting with external components.

• Security Impact:

• Direct consequences include unexpected application behavior, crashes, or data corruption.
• Potential cascading effects may involve security feature bypass, such as authentication or input validation failures.
• Business impact could be significant, including loss of data integrity, service downtime, or breaches of contract due to non-compliant behavior.

• Prevention Guidelines:

• Specific code-level fixes involve avoiding reliance on language or platform-specific quirks and behaviors that are not consistently defined.
• Security best practices include thorough testing across different platforms and configurations to ensure consistent behavior.
• Recommended tools and frameworks are those that enforce strict standards compliance and provide warnings or errors for use of undefined behaviors, such as static analysis tools and compilers with strict mode options.

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Technical Details

Likelihood of Exploit: Not specified

Affected Languages: Not specified

Affected Technologies: Not specified