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Weakness (CWE)

CWE-416: Use After Free

Variant

The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.

How to prevent it (2 mitigations)

  1. Architecture and Design

    Choose a language that provides automatic memory management.

  2. Implementation

    When freeing pointers, be sure to set them to NULL once they are freed. However, the utilization of multiple or complex data structures may lower the usefulness of this strategy.

Source: MITRE CWE-416

All Critical High Medium Low Exploited only Public exploit

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