CWE-228: Improper Handling of Syntactically Invalid… | Glexia
CWE-228 (Improper Handling of Syntactically Invalid Structure) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-228: Improper Handling of Syntactically Invalid Structure
Improper Handling of Syntactically Invalid Structure represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity Availability: Unexpected State DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU): If an input is syntactically invalid, then processing the input could place the system in an unexpected state that could lead to a crash, consume available system resources or other unintended behaviors.
Developer Pattern
CWE-228 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-228, 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-228: Improper Handling of Syntactically Invalid Structure
The product does not handle or incorrectly handles input that is not syntactically well-formed with respect to the associated specification.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This Android application has registered to handle a URL when sent an intent: The application assumes the URL will always be included in the intent. When the URL is not present, the call to getStringExtra() will return null, thus causing a null pointer exception when length() is called.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
- CWE-166: Improper Handling of Missing Special Element
- CWE-167: Improper Handling of Additional Special Element
- CWE-168: Improper Handling of Inconsistent Special Elements
- CWE-703: Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions
- CWE-707: Improper Neutralization
- CWE-229: Improper Handling of Values
- CWE-233: Improper Handling of Parameters
- CWE-237: Improper Handling of Structural Elements
- CWE-241: Improper Handling of Unexpected Data Type
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.