The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors listed by CWE/SANS

The US National Security Agency has helped building a list of the top 25 world's most dangerous programming errors which may lead to security vulnerabilities that can be attacked by the cyber criminals and this list of 25 errors is now assumed to be the minimum set of coding errors that must be fixed completely before letting the code to go live.

SANS Institute (based in Maryland) believes that just two of these 25 errors led to more than 1.5 million web-site security breaches during the year 2008. One can easily imagine how large the total number of security breaches all the 25 most dreaded errors may lead to. This is the reason why the industry felt a need for having a common consolidated list of the probable errors which the programmers should refer to as a minimum set of errors they need to be extremely careful about. It's assumed that this is the first time has reached to an agreement. More than 30 organisations (including various government, corporate, and educational institutions like US National Security Agency, US Department of Energy, Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, Purdue, etc.) have participated in this collaborative effort. CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) and SANS Institute together issued the list on January 12, 2009.

The list of the most dreaded 25 programming errors have been listed under three categories - Insecure Interaction Between Components, Risky Resource Management, and Porous Defences. The first two categories contain 9 errors each whereas the third category contains 7 errors. The official list of The Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors, listed category-wise is:-

Insecure Interaction Between Components

• CWE-20:Improper Input Validation
• CWE-116:Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
• CWE-89:Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure
• CWE-79:Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure
• CWE-78:Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure
• CWE-319:Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
• CWE-352:Cross-Site Request Forgery
• CWE-362:Race Condition
• CWE-209:Error Message Information Leak

Risky Resource Management 

• CWE-119:Failure to Constrain Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
• CWE-642:External Control of Critical State Data
• CWE-73:External Control of File Name or Path
• CWE-426:Untrusted Search Path
• CWE-94:Failure to Control Generation of Code
• CWE-494:Download of Code Without Integrity Check
• CWE-404:Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
• CWE-665:Improper Initialization
• CWE-682:Incorrect Calculation

Porous Defenses 

• CWE-285:Improper Access Control
• CWE-327:Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
• CWE-259:Hard-Coded Password
• CWE-732:Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
• CWE-330:Use of Insufficiently Random Values
• CWE-250:Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
• CWE-602:Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security

The errors may look quite trivial, but it's not-so-easy to avoid them creeping into an application of a considerable size, especially when a large application is being developed by a team(s) of sizeable people and hence it requires a well-defined process of code-review (peer and self both), checklist verification, etc. to be in place throughout the development phase. Should you require an explanation of what the above listed errors mean (which you probably won't require for most of them) then explore this link - CWE/SANS Top 25 errors list. . BBC News report on this list can be found here.

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