When the J2EE container attempts to write unserializable objects to disk there is no guarantee that the process will complete successfully.
In heavy load conditions, most J2EE application frameworks flush objects to disk to manage memory requirements of incoming requests. For example, session scoped objects, and even application scoped objects, are written to disk when required. While these application frameworks do the real work of writing objects to disk, they do not enforce that those objects be serializable, thus leaving the web application vulnerable to crashes induced by serialization failure. An attacker may be able to mount a denial of service attack by sending enough requests to the server to force the web application to save objects to disk.

Indirect

Primary

Implementation

Integrity
Modify Application Data
Data represented by unserializable objects can be corrupted.

Availability
DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
Non-serializability of objects can lead to system crash.

Architecture and Design
Implementation
All objects that become part of session and application scope must implement the java.io.Serializable interface to ensure serializability of containing objects.

In the following Java example, a Customer Entity JavaBean provides access to customer information in a database for a business application. The Customer Entity JavaBean is used as a session scoped object to return customer information to a Session EJB.

@Entitypublic class Customer {

private String id;private String firstName;private String lastName;private Address address;
public Customer() {}
public Customer(String id, String firstName, String lastName) {...}
@Idpublic String getCustomerId() {...}
public void setCustomerId(String id) {...}
public String getFirstName() {...}
public void setFirstName(String firstName) {...}
public String getLastName() {...}
public void setLastName(String lastName) {...}
@OneToOne()public Address getAddress() {...}
public void setAddress(Address address) {...}

}

However, the Customer Entity JavaBean is an unserialized object which can cause serialization failure and crash the application when the J2EE container attempts to write the object to the system. Session scoped objects must implement the Serializable interface to ensure that the objects serialize properly.

public class Customer implements Serializable {...}

SFP1
Glitch in computation

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 Time_of_Introduction

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

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2010-02-16
updated Demonstrative_Examples

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-01
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
2014-06-23
updated Description, Other_Notes

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

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2017-11-08
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2019-01-03
updated Weakness_Ordinalities

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2020-02-24
updated Relationships

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
2024-02-29
4.14
2024-02-29
updated Relationships

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

Persistence in J2EE Frameworks