Kingdom: API Abuse

An API is a contract between a caller and a callee. The most common forms of API abuse are caused by the caller failing to honor its end of this contract. For example, if a program fails to call chdir() after calling chroot(), it violates the contract that specifies how to change the active root directory in a secure fashion. Another good example of library abuse is expecting the callee to return trustworthy DNS information to the caller. In this case, the caller abuses the callee API by making certain assumptions about its behavior (that the return value can be used for authentication purposes). One can also violate the caller-callee contract from the other side. For example, if a coder subclasses SecureRandom and returns a non-random value, the contract is violated.

Code Correctness: Call to System.gc()

Java/JSP

Abstract

Explicit requests for garbage collection are a bellwether indicating likely performance problems.

Explanation

At some point in every Java developer's career, a problem surfaces that appears to be so mysterious, impenetrable, and impervious to debugging that there seems to be no alternative but to blame the garbage collector. Especially when the bug is related to time and state, there may be a hint of empirical evidence to support this theory: inserting a call to System.gc() sometimes seems to make the problem go away.

In almost every case we have seen, calling System.gc() is the wrong thing to do. In fact, calling System.gc() can cause performance problems if it is invoked too often.

References

[1] D. H. Hovermeyer FindBugs User Manual

[2] Standards Mapping - CIS Azure Kubernetes Service Benchmark 1.0

[3] Standards Mapping - CIS Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Benchmark 5.0

[4] Standards Mapping - CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark 1

[5] Standards Mapping - CIS Google Kubernetes Engine Benchmark normal

[6] Standards Mapping - Common Weakness Enumeration CWE ID 730

[7] Standards Mapping - DISA Control Correlation Identifier Version 2 CCI-001094

[8] Standards Mapping - NIST Special Publication 800-53 Revision 4 SC-5 Denial of Service Protection (P1)

[9] Standards Mapping - NIST Special Publication 800-53 Revision 5 SC-5 Denial of Service Protection

[10] Standards Mapping - OWASP Top 10 2004 A9 Application Denial of Service

[11] Standards Mapping - Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Version 1.1 Requirement 6.5.9

[12] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.1 APP6080 CAT II

[13] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.4 APP6080 CAT II

[14] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.5 APP6080 CAT II

[15] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.6 APP6080 CAT II

[16] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.7 APP6080 CAT II

[17] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.9 APP6080 CAT II

[18] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 3.10 APP6080 CAT II

[19] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.1 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[20] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.2 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[21] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.3 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[22] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.4 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[23] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.5 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[24] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.6 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[25] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.7 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[26] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.8 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[27] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.9 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[28] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.10 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[29] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 4.11 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[30] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 5.1 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[31] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 5.2 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[32] Standards Mapping - Security Technical Implementation Guide Version 5.3 APSC-DV-002400 CAT II

[33] Standards Mapping - Web Application Security Consortium Version 2.00 Denial of Service (WASC-10)

[34] Standards Mapping - Web Application Security Consortium 24 + 2 Denial of Service

desc.structural.java.code_correctness_call_to_system_gc