CWE-232: Improper Handling of Undefined Values | Glexia
CWE-232 (Improper Handling of Undefined Values) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-232: Improper Handling of Undefined Values
Improper Handling of Undefined Values represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Unexpected State
Developer Pattern
CWE-232 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-232, 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-232: Improper Handling of Undefined Values
The product does not handle or incorrectly handles when a value is not defined or supported for the associated parameter, field, or argument name.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In this example, an address parameter is read and trimmed of whitespace. If the value of the address parameter is null (undefined), the servlet will throw a NullPointerException when the trim() is attempted.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.