Improper Cleanup on Thrown Exception

The product does not clean up its state or incorrectly cleans up its state when an exception is thrown, leading to unexpected state or control flow.


Description

Often, when functions or loops become complicated, some level of resource cleanup is needed throughout execution. Exceptions can disturb the flow of the code and prevent the necessary cleanup from happening.

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

The following example demonstrates the weakness.

public class foo {

  public static final void main( String args[] ) {


    boolean returnValue;
    returnValue=doStuff();

  }
  public static final boolean doStuff( ) {


    boolean threadLock;
    boolean truthvalue=true;
    try {


      while(
      //check some condition
      ) {


        threadLock=true; //do some stuff to truthvalue
        threadLock=false;

      }

    }
    catch (Exception e){


      System.err.println("You did something bad");
      if (something) return truthvalue;

    }
    return truthvalue;

  }

}

In this case, a thread might be left locked accidentally.

See Also

Comprehensive Categorization: Resource Lifecycle Management

Weaknesses in this category are related to resource lifecycle management.

SEI CERT Perl Coding Standard - Guidelines 03. Expressions (EXP)

Weaknesses in this category are related to the rules and recommendations in the Expressions (EXP) section of the SEI CERT Perl Coding Standard.

SEI CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Java - Guidelines 07. Exceptional Behavior (ERR)

Weaknesses in this category are related to the rules and recommendations in the Exceptional Behavior (ERR) section of the SEI CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Java.

Comprehensive CWE Dictionary

This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.

Weaknesses Introduced During Implementation

This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during implementation.

Weakness Base Elements

This view (slice) displays only weakness base elements.


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