CWE-104: Struts: Form Bean Does Not Extend Validation Class | Glexia
CWE-104 (Struts: Form Bean Does Not Extend Validation Class) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-104: Struts: Form Bean Does Not Extend Validation Class
Struts: Form Bean Does Not Extend Validation Class represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Other: Bypassing the validation framework for a form exposes the application to numerous types of attacks. Unchecked input is an important component of vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting, process control, and SQL injection.
- Confidentiality Integrity Availability Other: Other: Although J2EE applications are not generally susceptible to memory corruption attacks, if a J2EE application interfaces with native code that does not perform array bounds checking, an attacker may be able to use an input validation mistake in the J2EE application to launch a buffer overflow attack.
Developer Pattern
CWE-104 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-104, 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-104: Struts: Form Bean Does Not Extend Validation Class
If a form bean does not extend an ActionForm subclass of the Validator framework, it can expose the application to other weaknesses related to insufficient input validation.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following Java example the class RegistrationForm is a Struts framework ActionForm Bean that will maintain user information from a registration webpage for an online business site. The user will enter registration data and through the Struts framework the RegistrationForm bean will maintain the user data. However, the RegistrationForm class extends the Struts ActionForm class which does not allow the RegistrationForm class to use the Struts validator capabilities. When using the Struts framework to maintain user data in an ActionForm Bean, the class should always extend one of the validator classes, ValidatorForm, ValidatorActionForm, DynaValidatorForm or DynaValidatorActionForm. These validator classes provide default validation and the validate method for custom validation for the Bean object to use for validating input data. The following Java example shows the RegistrationForm class extending the ValidatorForm class and implementing the validate method for validating input data. Note that the ValidatorForm class itself extends the ActionForm class within the Struts framework API.
Remediation
- Implementation: Ensure that all forms extend one of the Validation Classes.
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.