CWE-617 Reachable Assertion

The product contains an assert() or similar statement that can be triggered by an attacker, which leads to an application exit or other behavior that is more severe than necessary.

• Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart — While assertion is good for catching logic errors and reducing the chances of reaching more serious vulnerability conditions, an attacker can still cause a denial of service if they can trigger an assert statement, and if the scope of the assert() extends beyond the attacker's own session. For example, if a server handles multiple simultaneous connections, if an assert() occurs in one single connection that causes all other connections to be dropped, this could be a significant denial of service.

• [Implementation] If the assertion statement is required (e.g., for security or reliability), change the invoking code to avoid the conditions that trigger the assertion. • [Implementation] Consider changing the assertion to some other less "fatal" error. This might not be easy to implement, since other code may be needed to handle the error. • [Implementation] Make sensitive open/close operations non-reachable from directly user-controlled data (e.g. open/close resources) • [Implementation] Perform input validation on user data.

• 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.)

• CVE-2024-8768: API server for LLM library can crash when provided an empty prompt, which triggers a reachable assertion • CVE-2023-49286: Chain: function in web caching proxy does not correctly check a return value (CWE-253) leading to a reachable assertion (CWE-617) • CVE-2006-6767: FTP server allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon abort) via crafted commands which trigger an assertion failure. • CVE-2006-6811: Chat client allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a long message string when connecting to a server, which causes an assertion failure. • CVE-2006-5779: Product allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) via LDAP BIND requests with long authcid names, which triggers an assertion failure. • CVE-2006-4095: Product allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via certain queries, which cause an assertion failure. • CVE-2006-4574: Chain: security monitoring product has an off-by-one error that leads to unexpected length values, triggering an assertion. • CVE-2004-0270: Anti-virus product has an assertion error when the line length is non-numeric.