CWE-128

Wrap-around Error

Medium Risk

Weakness Description

Wrap around errors occur whenever a value is incremented past the maximum value for its type and therefore "wraps around" to a very small, negative, or undefined value.

Potential Mitigations

Requirements specification: The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.

Architecture and Design

Provide clear upper and lower bounds on the scale of any protocols designed.

Implementation

Perform validation on all incremented variables to ensure that they remain within reasonable bounds.

Common Consequences

Availability
DoS: Crash, Exit, or RestartDoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)DoS: Instability

This weakness will generally lead to undefined behavior and therefore crashes. In the case of overflows involving loop index variables, the likelihood of infinite loops is also high.

Integrity
Modify Memory

If the value in question is important to data (as opposed to flow), simple data corruption has occurred. Also, if the wrap around results in other conditions such as buffer overflows, further memory corruption may occur.

ConfidentialityAvailabilityAccess Control
Execute Unauthorized Code or CommandsBypass Protection Mechanism

This weakness can sometimes trigger buffer overflows which can be used to execute arbitrary code. This is usually outside the scope of a program's implicit security policy.

Detection Methods

Automated Static Analysis

Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)

Effectiveness: High

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