CWE-416Use After Free

Abstraction: Variant · CVEs in our corpus: 8,222

The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.

Last updated: 22 August 2026 14:14 UTC

Cumulative inbound coverage

How completely the frameworks we cross-walk collectively cover this — the verdict is the strongest single mapping (overlapping partials are not summed); breadth shows the corroboration behind it.

Collective: mostly · 3 mapping(s) from 3 framework(s): STIG rhel 9 1 (mostly) · STIG oracle linux 8 1 (partial) · STIG rhel 8 1 (partial)

See the full cumulative-coverage rollup →

Control responseHuman-reviewed

Answering this weakness across the control lifecycle, from our framework cross-walks.

Prevent

Stop it (NIST 800-53 / CSF Protect)

SI-16 Memory Protection
PR.PS-06
SA-11 Developer Testing and Evaluation
ID.RA-01

Detect

Catch it (CSF Detect / Respond)

—

Harden

Shrink the surface (DISA STIG)

3 hardening rules · 3 OS baselines

Validate

Prove the fix (OWASP ASVS)

V1.4.3

NIST 800-53 r5 controls that address this weakness (1)AI-assisted

Control	Title	Family	Why it addresses this CWE
`SI-16`	Memory Protection	SI	Use-after-free exploits that achieve arbitrary code execution are blocked or significantly hardened by non-executable pages and ASLR.

Top CVEs of this weakness type, ranked by Risk Priority

CVE	Risk	CVSS	EPSS	Published
`CVE-2021-22893` KEV	10.0	10.0	0.4717	2021-04-23
`CVE-2025-24085` KEV	10.0	10.0	0.1765	2025-01-27
`CVE-2014-1776` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.8801	2014-04-27
`CVE-2015-0313` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.9568	2015-02-02
`CVE-2015-5119` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.9934	2015-07-08
`CVE-2015-5122` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.9369	2015-07-14
`CVE-2015-5123` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.1849	2015-07-14
`CVE-2019-0708` KEV	9.9	9.8	1.0000	2019-05-16
`CVE-2020-3992` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.8302	2020-10-20
`CVE-2021-31166` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.9966	2021-05-11
`CVE-2024-9680` KEV	9.9	9.8	0.2318	2024-10-09
`CVE-2025-21298`	9.9	9.8	0.8091	2025-01-14
`CVE-2016-6309`	9.8	9.8	0.7022	2016-09-26
`CVE-2017-8895`	9.8	9.8	0.7100	2017-05-10
`CVE-2019-5096`	9.7	9.8	0.6698	2019-12-03
`CVE-2023-49606`	9.7	9.8	0.6308	2024-05-01
`CVE-2020-28018`	9.5	9.8	0.5675	2021-05-06
`CVE-2025-49844`	9.5	9.9	0.8677	2025-10-03
`CVE-2017-18017`	9.4	9.8	0.5284	2018-01-03
`CVE-2020-16017` KEV	9.4	9.6	0.0275	2021-01-08
`CVE-2021-30633` KEV	9.4	9.6	0.3266	2021-10-08
`CVE-2021-37973` KEV	9.4	9.6	0.1164	2021-10-08
`CVE-2022-26486` KEV	9.4	9.6	0.0235	2022-12-22
`CVE-2024-4671` KEV	9.4	9.6	0.0835	2024-05-14
`CVE-2017-16943`	9.3	9.8	0.4671	2017-11-25