CWE-401
Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime
AI Translation Available
The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.
Status
draft
Abstraction
variant
Likelihood
medium
Affected Platforms
C
C++
Not Language-Specific
Technical Details
AI Translation
Common Consequences
availability
other
Impacts
dos: crash, exit, or restart
dos: instability
dos: resource consumption (cpu)
dos: resource consumption (memory)
reduce performance
Detection Methods
fuzzing
automated static analysis
Potential Mitigations
Phases:
implementation
architecture and design
build and compilation
Descriptions:
•
Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.
•
Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.
•
The Boehm-Demers-Weiser Garbage Collector or valgrind can be used to detect leaks in code.
Functional Areas
memory management