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CWE Reference

CWE-178: Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity | Glexia

CWE-178 (Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessIncomplete
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Glexia's Take · Automated analysis

CWE-178: Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity

Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism

Developer Pattern

CWE-178 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.

Automation confidence

high confidence from CWE-178, 4.20.

Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-178: Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity

The product does not properly account for differences in case sensitivity when accessing or determining the properties of a resource, leading to inconsistent results.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Base
Status
Incomplete
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • In the following example, an XSS neutralization method intends to replace script tags in user-supplied input with a safe equivalent: The code only works when the "script" tag is in all lower-case, forming an incomplete denylist (CWE-184). Equivalent tags such as "SCRIPT" or "ScRiPt" will not be neutralized by this method, allowing an XSS attack.

Remediation

  • Architecture and Design: Avoid making decisions based on names of resources (e.g. files) if those resources can have alternate names.
  • Implementation:
  • Implementation: Inputs should be decoded and canonicalized to the application's current internal representation before being validated (CWE-180). Make sure that the application does not decode the same input twice (CWE-174). Such errors could be used to bypass allowlist validation schemes by introducing dangerous inputs after they have been checked.

Detection

  • Code review
  • SAST
  • DAST
  • Focused regression tests

Mappings

Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context

Related CWEs

Related CVEs

Related CVE mappings appear after CVE records are cross-indexed.

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ATT&CK Relevance

ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.