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Software developers can avoid the vulnerability or mitigate its ill effects in the following ways:

• A strategy for fault handling should be decided. Consistency in fault handling should be the same with respect to critically similar parts.
• A multi-tiered approach of fault prevention, fault detection, and fault reaction should be used.
• System-defined components that assist in uniformity of fault handling should be used when available. For one example, designing a "runtime constraint handler" (as described in Annex K of [the C Standard]) permits the application to intercept various erroneous situations and perform one consistent response, such as flushing a previous transaction and restarting at the next one.
• When there are multiple tasks, a fault-handling policy should be specified whereby a task may
  • halt, and keep its resources available for other tasks (perhaps permitting restarting of the faulting task)
  • halt, and remove its resources (perhaps to allow other tasks to use the resources so freed, or to allow a recreation of the task)
  • halt, and signal the rest of the program to likewise halt

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Failure to adopt and implement a consistent and comprehensive error-handling policy is detrimental to system survivability and can result in a broad range of vulnerabilities depending on the operational characteristics of the system.

Related Vulnerabilities

Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this rule on the CERT website.

Related Guidelines

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Automated Detection

Related Guidelines

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ISO/IEC TR 24772:2013	Termination Strategy [REU]
MISRA C:2012	Rule 17.1 (required)
MITRE CWE	CWE-391, Unchecked error condition CWE-544, Missing standardized error handling mechanism

Bibliography

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