Unsafe Mobile Code: Public finalize() Method

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Vulnerabilities Table of Contents

ASDR Table of Contents

Description
The program violates secure coding principles for mobile code by declaring a finalizemethod public.

A program should never call finalize explicitly, except to call super.finalize inside an implementation of finialize. In mobile code situations, the otherwise error prone practice of manual garbage collection can become a security threat if an attacker can maliciously invoke one of your finalize methods because it is declared with public access. If you are using finalize as it was designed, there is no reason to declare finalize with anything other than protected access.

For more details about mobile code and its security concerns, please see Category:Unsafe Mobile Code.

Risk Factors

 * Talk about the factors that make this vulnerability likely or unlikely to actually happen
 * Discuss the technical impact of a successful exploit of this vulnerability
 * Consider the likely [business impacts] of a successful attack

Examples
The following Java Applet code mistakenly declares a public finalize method.

public final class urlTool extends Applet { public void finalize { ...		}		...	}

Related Attacks

 * Attack 1
 * Attack 2

Related Vulnerabilities

 * Vulnerability 1
 * Vulnerabiltiy 2

Related Controls

 * Control 1
 * Control 2

Related Technical Impacts

 * Technical Impact 1
 * Technical Impact 2