Exposed Dangerous Method or Function
Exposed Dangerous Method or Function
CWE-749
Overtime trend (NVD)
CVSS severity (NVD, All Time)
Per technology (GHSA, All time)
- 66%-Maven
- 33%-Pip
Short description
Extended description
This weakness can lead to a wide variety of resultant weaknesses, depending on the behavior of the exposed method. It can apply to any number of technologies and approaches, such as ActiveX controls, Java functions, IOCTLs, and so on.
The exposure can occur in a few different ways:
- The function/method was never intended to be exposed to outside actors.
- The function/method was only intended to be accessible to a limited set of actors, such as Internet-based access from a single web site.
Best practices to prevent this CWE
Phase: Architecture and Design
If you must expose a method, make sure to perform input validation on all arguments, limit access to authorized parties, and protect against all possible vulnerabilities.
Phase: Architecture and Design; Implementation
Strategy: Attack Surface Reduction
Identify all exposed functionality. Explicitly list all functionality that must be exposed to some user or set of users. Identify which functionality may be:
Ensure that the implemented code follows these expectations. This includes setting the appropriate access modifiers where applicable (public, private, protected, etc.) or not marking ActiveX controls safe-for-scripting.
- accessible to all users
- restricted to a small set of privileged users
- prevented from being directly accessible at all
