CWE-396—Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception

Weakness Name

Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception

Description

Catching overly broad exceptions promotes complex error handling code that is more likely to contain security vulnerabilities.

Multiple catch blocks can get ugly and repetitive, but "condensing" catch blocks by catching a high-level class like Exception can obscure exceptions that deserve special treatment or that should not be caught at this point in the program. Catching an overly broad exception essentially defeats the purpose of a language's typed exceptions, and can become particularly dangerous if the program grows and begins to throw new types of exceptions. The new exception types will not receive any attention.

Common Consequences

Scope:

Non-Repudiation, Other

Impact:

Hide Activities

Notes:

A generic exception can hide details about unexpected adversary activities by making it difficult to properly troubleshoot error conditions during execution.

Related Weaknesses

• CWE-221Information Loss or Omission
• CWE-705Incorrect Control Flow Scoping
• CWE-755Improper Handling of Exceptional ConditionsMedium