The product throws or raises an overly broad exceptions that can hide important details and produce inappropriate responses to certain conditions.
Declaring a method to throw Exception or Throwable promotes generic error handling procedures that make it difficult for callers to perform proper error handling and error recovery. For example, Java's exception mechanism makes it easy for callers to anticipate what can go wrong and write code to handle each specific exceptional circumstance. Declaring that a method throws a generic form of exception defeats this system.

Primary

Implementation

Non-Repudiation
Other
Hide Activities
Alter Execution Logic
Throwing a generic exception can hide details about unexpected adversary activities by making it difficult to properly troubleshoot error conditions during execution.

Automated Static Analysis
Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
High

The following method throws three types of exceptions.

public void doExchange() throws IOException, InvocationTargetException, SQLException {...}

While it might seem tidier to write

public void doExchange() throws Exception {...}

doing so hampers the caller's ability to understand and handle the exceptions that occur. Further, if a later revision of doExchange() introduces a new type of exception that should be treated differently than previous exceptions, there is no easy way to enforce this requirement.

Early versions of C++ (C++98, C++03, C++11) included a feature known as Dynamic Exception Specification. This allowed functions to declare what type of exceptions it may throw. It is possible to declare a general class of exception to cover any derived exceptions that may be thrown.

int myfunction() throw(std::exception) {if (0) throw out_of_range();throw length_error();}

In the example above, the code declares that myfunction() can throw an exception of type "std::exception" thus hiding details about the possible derived exceptions that could potentially be thrown.

Overly-Broad Throws Declaration

ERR07-J
Do not throw RuntimeException, Exception, or Throwable

SFP5
Ambiguous Exception Type

ASCSM-CWE-397

ASCRM-CWE-397

Allowed
This CWE entry is at the Base level of abstraction, which is a preferred level of abstraction for mapping to the root causes of vulnerabilities.
Carefully read both the name and description to ensure that this mapping is an appropriate fit. Do not try to 'force' a mapping to a lower-level Base/Variant simply to comply with this preferred level of abstraction.

For C++, this weakness only applies to C++98, C++03, and C++11. It relies on a feature known as Dynamic Exception Specification, which was part of early versions of C++ but was deprecated in C++11. It has been removed for C++17 and later.

7 Pernicious Kingdoms
2006-07-19
Draft 3
2006-07-19

Eric Dalci
Cigital
2008-07-01
updated Time_of_Introduction

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2008-09-08
updated Applicable_Platforms, Relationships, Other_Notes, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2008-09-24
Removed C from Applicable_Platforms

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2008-10-14
updated Applicable_Platforms

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2009-03-10
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2009-05-27
updated Demonstrative_Examples

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2009-10-29
updated Description, Other_Notes

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-01
updated Common_Consequences, Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-05-11
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2014-07-30
updated Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2019-01-03
updated Applicable_Platforms, Demonstrative_Examples, References, Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2020-02-24
updated References

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-04-27
updated Detection_Factors, Relationships, Time_of_Introduction

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-06-29
updated Mapping_Notes

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2024-02-29
4.14
2024-02-29
updated Demonstrative_Examples

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2025-04-03
4.17
2025-04-03
updated Applicable_Platforms, Common_Consequences, Demonstrative_Examples, Description

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2025-12-11
4.19
2025-12-11
updated Relationships, Weakness_Ordinalities

Overly-Broad Throws Declaration