CWEweakness

CWE-685 Function Call With Incorrect Number of Arguments

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Abstraction
Variant
Structure
Simple
Status
Draft
Languages
C, Perl
CWE version
5.0

Description

The product calls a function, procedure, or routine, but the caller specifies too many arguments, or too few arguments, which may lead to undefined behavior and resultant weaknesses.

Common consequences

• Other: Quality Degradation

Potential mitigations

• [Testing] Because this function call often produces incorrect behavior it will usually be detected during testing or normal operation of the product. During testing exercise all possible control paths will typically expose this weakness except in rare cases when the incorrect function call accidentally produces the correct results or if the provided argument type is very similar to the expected argument type.

Detection methods

• Other: While this weakness might be caught by the compiler in some languages, it can occur more frequently in cases in which the called function accepts variable numbers of arguments, such as format strings in C. It also can occur in languages or environments that do not require that functions always be called with the correct number of arguments, such as Perl.

Related

Child of · CWE (1)

  • CWE-628 Function Call with Incorrectly Specified Arguments weakness

Referenced by CVE · weakness (2)

  • CVE-2026-11389 Out-of-bounds Read, Function Call With Incorrect Number of Arguments, Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion')… vulnerability
  • CVE-2026-18458 Out-of-bounds Read, Function Call With Incorrect Number of Arguments, Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion')… vulnerability