Question

Describe why overly broad exceptions are a problem. In particular, what should you do if you are worried you might catch an exception you cannot directly deal with?

Answer 1

Multiple catch blocks can get repetitive, but condensing catch blocks by catching a high-level class such as Exception can obscure exceptions that deserve special treatment .

Catching an overly broad exception essentially defeats the purpose of Java's typed exceptions , and can become particularly dangerous if the program grows and begins to throw new types of exceptions.The new exception types will not receive any attention.

• If you don't handle an exception at all, it could lead to the program crashing. This could be used for a denial of service attack - simply overflow the server with malicious requests that will crash it, and it will spend all it's time restarting instead of serving legitimate requests.
• Unhandled exception might lead to disclosure of sensitive information, if error messages are passed on in HTTP responses.
• Overly broad catch statement that catch everything could lead to security critical exceptions being glossed over.