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CWE-476

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CWE-476

NULL Pointer Dereference

Base
Stable

Description

The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.

Common Consequences

Scope

Availability

Impact

DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

Scope

Integrity
Confidentiality

Impact

Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, Read Memory, Modify Memory

Potential Mitigations

Implementation

For any pointers that could have been modified or provided from a function that can return NULL, check the pointer for NULL before use. When working with a multithreaded or otherwise asynchronous environment, ensure that proper locking APIs are used to lock before the check, and unlock when it has finished [REF-1484].

Requirements

Select a programming language that is not susceptible to these issues.

Implementation

Check the results of all functions that return a value and verify that the value is non-null before acting upon it.

Architecture and Design

Identify all variables and data stores that receive information from external sources, and apply input validation to make sure that they are only initialized to expected values.

Implementation

Explicitly initialize all variables and other data stores, either during declaration or just before the first usage.

CVE-2024-41130

C++ library for LLM inference has NULL pointer dereference if a read operation fails

CVE-2005-3274

race condition causes a table to be corrupted if a timer activates while it is being modified, leading to resultant NULL dereference; also involves locking.

CVE-2002-1912

large number of packets leads to NULL dereference

CVE-2005-0772

packet with invalid error status value triggers NULL dereference

CVE-2009-4895

Chain: race condition for an argument value, possibly resulting in NULL dereference

CVE-2020-29652

ssh component for Go allows clients to cause a denial of service (nil pointer dereference) against SSH servers.

CVE-2009-2692

Chain: Use of an unimplemented network socket operation pointing to an uninitialized handler function (CWE-456) causes a crash because of a null pointer dereference (CWE-476).

CVE-2009-3547

Chain: race condition (CWE-362) might allow resource to be released before operating on it, leading to NULL dereference (CWE-476)

CVE-2009-3620

Chain: some unprivileged ioctls do not verify that a structure has been initialized before invocation, leading to NULL dereference

CVE-2009-2698

Chain: IP and UDP layers each track the same value with different mechanisms that can get out of sync, possibly resulting in a NULL dereference

+15 more examples

Applicable Platforms

C
C++
Java
C#
Go

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