Early Access — Mondoo Vulnerability Intelligence is currently in preview.
Casting a non-structure type to a structure type and accessing a field can lead to memory access errors or data corruption.
The choice could be made to use a language that is not susceptible to these issues.
Review of type casting operations can identify locations where incompatible types are cast.
Adjacent variables in memory may be corrupted by assignments performed on fields after the cast.
Execution may end due to a memory access error.
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.)