974
Weakness Ordinalities
Resultant :
Applicable Platforms
Language : C (Prevalence = Undetermined)
Language : C++ (Prevalence = Undetermined)
Alternate Terms
Memory Leak :
Likelihood Of Exploit
Medium
Common Consequences
Scope Impact Likelihood
Availability DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
DoS: Instability
DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)
DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)
Most memory leaks result in general product reliability
problems, but if an attacker can intentionally trigger a
memory leak, the attacker might be able to launch a denial
of service attack (by crashing or hanging the program) or
take advantage of other unexpected program behavior
resulting from a low memory condition.
Other Reduce Performance
Detection Methods
Fuzzing
Fuzz testing (fuzzing) is a powerful technique for generating large numbers of diverse inputs
- either randomly or algorithmically - and dynamically invoking the code with those inputs.
Even with random inputs, it is often capable of generating unexpected results such as crashes,
memory corruption, or resource consumption. Fuzzing effectively produces repeatable test cases
that clearly indicate bugs, which helps developers to diagnose the issues.
Effectiveness = High
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
Potential Mitigations
Phase: Implementation
Strategy = Libraries or Frameworks
Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual
memory management less error-prone. For example, glibc in Linux provides protection
against free of invalid pointers. When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic
reference counting (ARC) [REF-391]. To help correctly and consistently manage memory when
CWE Version 4.14
CWE-401: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime
CWE-401: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime