CREST Practitioner Security Analyst (CPSA) 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

In Objective-C programming, a common vulnerability encountered is memory leak. This occurs when the programmer allocates memory on the heap but fails to release it after use, leading to wasted memory resources and potential application instability over time. Objective-C, being a language that utilizes manual memory management (in addition to having garbage collection capabilities in some contexts), relies on the developer to correctly manage object references and memory allocation.

When memory is not properly deallocated, it keeps consuming system resources, which can significantly degrade program performance and may lead to crashes or unexpected behavior in longer-running applications. Practitioners must implement practices such as using Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) or carefully managing reference counting of objects to prevent this vulnerability.

In contrast to memory leak, code insertion, log injection, and invalid memory access vulnerabilities are more related to issues of input validation, logging practices, and pointer arithmetic, respectively. They do not have the same direct link to Objective-C's memory management characteristics as memory leaks do.