The product violates the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification by using the java.io package.
The Enterprise JavaBeans specification requires that every bean provider follow a set of programming guidelines designed to ensure that the bean will be portable and behave consistently in any EJB container. In this case, the product violates the following EJB guideline: "An enterprise bean must not use the java.io package to attempt to access files and directories in the file system." The specification justifies this requirement in the following way: "The file system APIs are not well-suited for business components to access data. Business components should use a resource manager API, such as JDBC, to store data."

Primary

Implementation

Other
Quality Degradation

Implementation
Do not use Java I/O when writing EJBs.

The following Java example is a simple stateless Enterprise JavaBean that retrieves the interest rate for the number of points for a mortgage. In this example, the interest rates for various points are retrieved from an XML document on the local file system, and the EJB uses the Java I/O API to retrieve the XML document from the local file system.

@Statelesspublic class InterestRateBean implements InterestRateRemote {

private Document interestRateXMLDocument = null;private File interestRateFile = null;
public InterestRateBean() {
try {

/* get XML document from the local filesystem */
interestRateFile = new File(Constants.INTEREST_RATE_FILE);
if (interestRateFile.exists()){DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();interestRateXMLDocument = db.parse(interestRateFile);}
} catch (IOException ex) {...}
}
public BigDecimal getInterestRate(Integer points) {return getInterestRateFromXML(points);}

/* member function to retrieve interest rate from XML document on the local file system */

private BigDecimal getInterestRateFromXML(Integer points) {...}
}

This use of the Java I/O API within any kind of Enterprise JavaBean violates the EJB specification by using the java.io package for accessing files within the local filesystem.
An Enterprise JavaBean should use a resource manager API for storing and accessing data. In the following example, the private member function getInterestRateFromXMLParser uses an XML parser API to retrieve the interest rates.

@Statelesspublic class InterestRateBean implements InterestRateRemote {

public InterestRateBean() {}
public BigDecimal getInterestRate(Integer points) {return getInterestRateFromXMLParser(points);}

/* member function to retrieve interest rate from XML document using an XML parser API */

private BigDecimal getInterestRateFromXMLParser(Integer points) {...}
}

SFP3
Use of an improper API

Allowed
This CWE entry is at the Variant 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.

CWE Community
2006-12-15
Draft 5
2006-12-15
Submitted by members of the CWE community to extend early CWE versions

Eric Dalci
Cigital
2008-07-01
updated Potential_Mitigations, Time_of_Introduction

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

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

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2009-12-28
updated Demonstrative_Examples

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-01
updated Common_Consequences

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-27
updated Common_Consequences

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-05-11
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-10-30
updated Potential_Mitigations

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

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2020-02-24
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-01-31
updated Description

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

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-06-29
updated Mapping_Notes

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