Information Loss or Omission

Description

This can be resultant, e.g. a buffer overflow might trigger a crash before the product can log the event.

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

This code logs suspicious multiple login attempts.

function login($userName,$password){

  if(authenticate($userName,$password)){
    return True;
  }
  else{
    incrementLoginAttempts($userName);
    if(recentLoginAttempts($userName) > 5){
      writeLog("Failed login attempt by User: " . $userName . " at " + date('r') );
    }
  }

}

This code only logs failed login attempts when a certain limit is reached. If an attacker knows this limit, they can stop their attack from being discovered by avoiding the limit.

See Also