The program violates secure coding principles for mobile code by declaring a finalize()
method 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.
Example 1: The following Java Applet code mistakenly declares a public finalize()
method.
public final class urlTool extends Applet {
public void finalize() {
...
}
...
}
[1] Standards Mapping - Common Weakness Enumeration - (CWE) CWE ID 583
[2] G. McGraw Securing Java. Chapter 7: Java Security Guidelines