CWE-396—Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception
PUBLISHEDweakness record
released 2006-07-19 · last modified 2025-12-11
Metadata
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.