CWEweakness

CWE-586 Explicit Call to Finalize()

Official page ↗
Abstraction
Base
Structure
Simple
Status
Draft
Languages
Java
CWE version
5.0

Description

The product makes an explicit call to the finalize() method from outside the finalizer.

Common consequences

• Integrity, Other: Unexpected State, Quality Degradation — While the Java Language Specification allows an object's finalize() method to be called from outside the finalizer, doing so is usually a bad idea. For example, calling finalize() explicitly means that finalize() will be called more than once: the first time will be the explicit call and the last time will be the call that is made after the object is garbage collected.

Potential mitigations

• [Implementation] Do not make explicit calls to finalize().

Detection methods

• Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)

Related

Child of · CWE (1)

  • CWE-1076 Insufficient Adherence to Expected Conventions weakness

Referenced by CWE · peer of (1)

  • CWE-675 Multiple Operations on Resource in Single-Operation Context weakness