Attempt to Access Child of a Non-structure Pointer

Incomplete Variant

Structure: Simple

Description

Casting a non-structure type to a structure type and accessing a field can lead to memory access errors or data corruption.

Common Consequences 2

Scope: Integrity

Impact: Modify Memory

Adjacent variables in memory may be corrupted by assignments performed on fields after the cast.

Scope: Availability

Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

Execution may end due to a memory access error.

Potential Mitigations 2

Phase: Requirements

The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.

Phase: Implementation

Review of type casting operations can identify locations where incompatible types are cast.

Demonstrative Examples 1

The following example demonstrates the weakness.

Code Example:Bad
C
c

Observed Examples 1

CVE-2021-3510JSON decoder accesses a C union using an invalid offset to an object

Modes of Introduction

Implementation

Related Weaknesses

ChildOf:

ChildOf:

Taxonomy Mapping