CWE-1025: Comparison Using Wrong Factors
Official CWE-1025 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-1025: Comparison Using Wrong Factors
Comparison Using Wrong Factors represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context: This can lead to incorrect results and resultant weaknesses. For example, the code might inadvertently compare references to objects, instead of the relevant contents of those objects, causing two "equal" objects to be considered unequal.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1025 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.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-1025, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1025: Comparison Using Wrong Factors
The code performs a comparison between two entities, but the comparison examines the wrong factors or characteristics of the entities, which can lead to incorrect results and resultant weaknesses.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the example below, two Java String objects are declared and initialized with the same string values. An if statement is used to determine if the strings are equivalent. However, the if statement will not be executed as the strings are compared using the "==" operator. For Java objects, such as String objects, the "==" operator compares object references, not object values. While the two String objects above contain the same string values, they refer to different object references, so the System.out.println statement will not be executed. To compare object values, the previous code could be modified to use the equals method:
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Manual Static Analysis: Thoroughly test the comparison scheme before deploying code into production. Perform positive testing as well as negative testing.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.