OBJ00-J. Limit the extensibility of classes and methods with invariants

Java classes and methods may have invariants. An invariant is a property that is assumed to be true at certain points during program execution but is not formally specified as true. Invariants may be used in assert statements or may be informally specified in comments.

Method invariants can include guarantees made about what the method can do, requirements about the state of the object when the method is invoked, or guarantees about the state of the object when the method completes. For example, a method of a Date class might guarantee that 1 <= day_of_month <= 31 when the method exits.  

Class invariants are guarantees made about the state of their objects' fields upon the completion of any of their methods. For example, classes whose member fields may not be modified once they have assumed a value are called immutable classes. An important consequence of immutability is that the invariants of instances of these classes are preserved throughout their lifetimes.

Similarly, classes can rely on invariants to properly implement their public interfaces. These invariants might relate to the state of member fields or the implementation of member methods. Generally, classes can rely on encapsulation to help maintain these invariants, for example, by making member fields private. However, encapsulation can be incompatible with extensibility. For example, a class designer might want a method to be publicly accessible yet rely on the particulars of its implementation when using it in another method within the class. In this case, overriding the method in a subclass can break the internal invariants of the class.  Extensibility consequently carries with it two significant risks: a subclass can fail to satisfy the invariants promised to clients by its superclass, and it can break the internal invariants on which the superclass relies. For example, an immutable class that lacks the final qualifier can be extended by a malicious subclass that can modify the state of the supposedly immutable object. Furthermore, a malicious subclass object can impersonate the immutable object while actually remaining mutable. Such malicious subclasses can violate program invariants on which clients depend, consequently introducing security vulnerabilities. Note that the same can be said for a benign subclass that mistakenly supports mutability. These risks relate to both benign and malicious development.

To mitigate these risks, classes must be declared final by default. Developers should permit extensibility only when there is a perceived need for it and must, in that case, carefully design the class with extensibility in mind. As a specific instance of this rule, classes that are designed to be treated as immutable either must be declared final or must have all of their member methods and fields declared final or private.

In systems where code can come from mixed protection domains, some superclasses might want to permit extension by trusted subclasses while simultaneously preventing extension by untrusted code. Declaring such superclasses to be final is infeasible because it would prevent the required extension by trusted code. One commonly suggested approach is to place code at each point where the superclass can be instantiated to check that the class being instantiated is either the superclass itself or a trustworthy subclass. However, this approach is brittle and is safe only in Java SE 6 or higher (see OBJ11-J. Be wary of letting constructors throw exceptions for a full discussion of the issues involved).

Noncompliant Code Example (BigInteger)

The java.math.BigInteger class is itself an example of noncompliant code. It is nonfinal and consequently extendable. This can be a problem when operating on an instance of BigInteger that was obtained from an untrusted client. For example, a malicious client could construct a spurious mutable BigInteger instance by overriding BigInteger's member functions [Bloch 2008].

The following code example demonstrates such an attack:

BigInteger msg = new BigInteger("123");
msg = msg.modPow(exp, m);  // Always returns 1

// Malicious subclassing of java.math.BigInteger
class BigInteger extends java.math.BigInteger {
  private int value;

  public BigInteger(String str) {
    super(str);
    value = Integer.parseInt(str);
  }

  public void setValue(int value) {
    this.value = value;
  }

  @Override public java.math.BigInteger modPow(
      java.math.BigInteger exponent, java.math.BigInteger m) {
    this.value = ((int) (Math.pow(this.doubleValue(),  
                                  exponent.doubleValue()))) % m.intValue();
    return this;
  }
}

Unlike the benign BigInteger class, this malicious BigInteger class is clearly mutable because of the setValue() method. Furthermore, the malicious modPow() method (which overrides a benign modPow() method) is subject to precision loss (see NUM00-J. Detect or prevent integer overflow, NUM08-J. Check floating-point inputs for exceptional values, NUM12-J. Ensure conversions of numeric types to narrower types do not result in lost or misinterpreted data, and NUM13-J. Avoid loss of precision when converting primitive integers to floating-point for more information). Any code that receives an object of this class and assumes that the object is immutable will behave unexpectedly. This is particularly important because the BigInteger.modPow() method has several useful cryptographic applications.

Noncompliant Code Example (Security Manager)

This noncompliant code example installs a security manager check in the constructor of the BigInteger class. The security manager denies access when it detects that a subclass without the requisite permissions is attempting to instantiate the superclass [SCG 2009]. It also compares class types, in compliance with OBJ09-J. Compare classes and not class names. Note that this check does not prevent malicious extensions of BigInteger; it instead prevents the creation of BigInteger objects from untrusted code, which also prevents creation of objects of malicious extensions of BigInteger.

public class BigInteger {
  public BigInteger(String str) {
    securityManagerCheck(); 

    // ...
  }

  // Check the permission needed to subclass BigInteger
  // throws a security exception if not allowed
  private void securityManagerCheck() {
    // ...
  }
}

Unfortunately, throwing an exception from the constructor of a nonfinal class is insecure because it allows a finalizer attack (see OBJ11-J. Be wary of letting constructors throw exceptions).

Compliant Solution (Final)

This compliant solution prevents creation of malicious subclasses by declaring the immutable BigInteger class to be final. Although this solution would be appropriate for locally maintained code, it cannot be used in the case of java.math.BigInteger because it would require changing the Java SE API, which has already been published and must remain compatible with previous versions.

final class BigInteger {
  // ...
}

Compliant Solution (Java SE 6, Public and Private Constructors)

This compliant solution invokes a security manager check as a side effect of computing the Boolean value passed to a private constructor (as seen in OBJ11-J. Be wary of letting constructors throw exceptions). The rules for order of evaluation require that the security manager check must execute before invocation of the private constructor. Consequently, the security manager check also executes before invocation of any superclass's constructor.

This solution prevents the finalizer attack; it applies to Java SE 6 and later versions, where throwing an exception before the java.lang.Object constructor exits prevents execution of finalizers [SCG 2009].

public class BigInteger {
  public BigInteger(String str) {
    this(str, check());
  }

  private BigInteger(String str, boolean dummy) {
    // Regular construction goes here
  }

  private static boolean check() {
    securityManagerCheck(); 
    return true;
  }
}

Risk Assessment

Permitting a nonfinal class or method to be inherited without checking the class instance allows a malicious subclass to misuse the privileges of the class.

Automated Detection

This rule is not checkable because it depends on factors that are unspecified in the code, including the invariants upon which the code relies and the necessity of designating a class as extensible, among others.  However, simple statistical methods might be useful to find codebases that violate this rule by checking whether a given codebase contains a higher-than-average number of classes left nonfinal.

Related Guidelines

Bibliography