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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 multitiered 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 ISO/IEC TR 24731-1) 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
Risk Analysis
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.
Recommendation | Severity | Likelihood | Remediation Cost | Priority | Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ERR00-A C | medium | probable | high | P4 | L3 |
Related Vulnerabilities
Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this rule on the CERT website.
References
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\[[Fisher 99|AA. C References#Fisher 99]\] \[[Horton 90|AA. C References#Horton 90]\] Section 11, p. 168, and Section 14, p. 254 \[[ISO/IEC 9899:1999|AA. C References#ISO/IEC 9899-1999]\] Sections 7.1.4, 7.9.10.4, and 7.11.6.2 \[[ISO/IEC PDTR 24772|AA. C References#ISO/IEC PDTR 24772]\] "REU Termination strategy" and "NZN Returning error status" \[[Koenig 89|AA. C References#Koenig 89]\] Section 5.4, p. 73 \[[Lipson 00|AA. C References#Lipson 00]\] \[[Lipson 06|AA. C References#Lipson 06]\] \[[MISRA 04|AA. C References#MISRA 04]\] Rule 16.1 \[[Summit 05|AA. C References#Summit 05]\] C-FAQ Question 20.4 |
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12. Error Handling (ERR) 12. Error Handling (ERR) ERR01-A. Use ferror() rather than errno to check for FILE stream errors