Empty Catch Block

ID

java.empty_catch_block

Severity

high

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

low

Resource

Reliability

Language

Java

Tags

CWE:1069, reliability

Description

Reports catch blocks whose body is empty.

Rationale

An empty catch block silently swallows the exception, hiding failures that may lead to incorrect program state, data corruption, or security vulnerabilities. When an exception is ignored without explanation, debugging production incidents becomes extremely difficult because the root cause is never logged.

// Bad - exception is silently swallowed
try {
    parseInput(data);
} catch (ParseException e) {
}

Remediation

At a minimum, log the exception. If the exception is genuinely expected and ignorable, add a comment explaining why:

// Good - exception is logged
try {
    parseInput(data);
} catch (ParseException e) {
    log.warn("Failed to parse input", e);
}

References