CWE-382 — J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit()
CWE-382: J2EE Bad Practices: Use of System.exit()
MITRE CWE weakness
| Kind | Weakness |
| Abstraction | Variant |
| Status | Draft |
| Likelihood of exploit | — |
Description
A J2EE application uses System.exit(), which also shuts down its container.
It is never a good idea for a web application to attempt to shut down the application container. Access to a function that can shut down the application is an avenue for Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
Common consequences
- Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
Mitigations
Architecture and Design — The shutdown function should be a privileged function available only to a properly authorized administrative user
Implementation — Web applications should not call methods that cause the virtual machine to exit, such as System.exit()
Implementation — Web applications should also not throw any Throwables to the application server as this may adversely affect the container.
Implementation — Non-web applications may have a main() method that contains a System.exit(), but generally should not call System.exit() from other locations in the code
References
- CWE page: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/382.html
- CWE list: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/index.html