The STRONG.TYPE family of checkers detects situations in which programmer-enforced strong typing (type-defined abstract types) is broken or ignored, allowing the underlying ANSI type semantics to dominate.

The STRONG.TYPE.EXTRACT checker looks for an instance in which a strongly typed value is assigned to a different, not strongly typed variable in one of these ways:

through an assignment operator
in a return value
through argument passing
in initialization

Vulnerability and risk

A compiler following the ANSI standard won't report a warning for this sort of issue, as it checks only the underlying types, not the surface, or programmer-defined, types. As a result, it's possible that a logic error can occur.

Vulnerable code example

1 typedef int Count;
2
3 int main() {
4  Count a;
5  int b = a; 
6  return 0;
7 }

Klocwork flags line 5, indicating that a strongly typed variable is assigned to a different, not strongly typed variable.

STRONG.TYPE.EXTRACT

Assignment of strong type variable to different type variable

Vulnerability and risk

Vulnerable code example

Related checkers