Common Weakness Enumeration

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When the J2EE container attempts to write unserializable objects to disk there is no guarantee that the process will complete successfully.

In heavy load conditions, most J2EE application frameworks flush objects to disk to manage memory requirements of incoming requests. For example, session scoped objects, and even application scoped objects, are written to disk when required. While these application frameworks do the real work of writing objects to disk, they do not enforce that those objects be serializable, thus leaving the web application vulnerable to crashes induced by serialization failure. An attacker may be able to mount a denial of service attack by sending enough requests to the server to force the web application to save objects to disk.

Section HelpThis table specifies different individual consequences associated with the weakness. The Scope identifies the application security area that is violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an adversary succeeds in exploiting this weakness. The Likelihood provides information about how likely the specific consequence is expected to be seen relative to the other consequences in the list. For example, there may be high likelihood that a weakness will be exploited to achieve a certain impact, but a low likelihood that it will be exploited to achieve a different impact.

Impact	Details
Modify Application Data	Scope: Integrity Data represented by unserializable objects can be corrupted.
DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart	Scope: Availability Non-serializability of objects can lead to system crash.

Section HelpThe different Modes of Introduction provide information about how and when this weakness may be introduced. The Phase identifies a point in the life cycle at which introduction may occur, while the Note provides a typical scenario related to introduction during the given phase.

Phase	Note
Implementation

Section HelpThis listing shows possible areas for which the given weakness could appear. These may be for specific named Languages, Operating Systems, Architectures, Paradigms, Technologies, or a class of such platforms. The platform is listed along with how frequently the given weakness appears for that instance.

Example 1

In the following Java example, a Customer Entity JavaBean provides access to customer information in a database for a business application. The Customer Entity JavaBean is used as a session scoped object to return customer information to a Session EJB.

However, the Customer Entity JavaBean is an unserialized object which can cause serialization failure and crash the application when the J2EE container attempts to write the object to the system. Session scoped objects must implement the Serializable interface to ensure that the objects serialize properly.

Section HelpThis MemberOf Relationships table shows additional CWE Categories and Views that reference this weakness as a member. This information is often useful in understanding where a weakness fits within the context of external information sources.