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Weakness (CWE)

CWE-476: NULL Pointer Dereference

Base

The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.

How to prevent it (5 mitigations)

  1. Implementation

    For any pointers that could have been modified or provided from a function that can return NULL, check the pointer for NULL before use. When working with a multithreaded or otherwise asynchronous environment, ensure that proper locking APIs are used to lock before the check, and unlock when it has finished [REF-1484].

  2. Requirements

    Select a programming language that is not susceptible to these issues.

  3. Implementation

    Check the results of all functions that return a value and verify that the value is non-null before acting upon it.

  4. Architecture and Design

    Identify all variables and data stores that receive information from external sources, and apply input validation to make sure that they are only initialized to expected values.

  5. Implementation

    Explicitly initialize all variables and other data stores, either during declaration or just before the first usage.

Source: MITRE CWE-476

All Critical High Medium Low Exploited only Public exploit

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