Live Active security incident? Get immediate response
CWE Reference

CWE-168: Improper Handling of Inconsistent Special Elements

Official CWE-168 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessDraft
Search CWE CWE Dictionary

Glexia's Take

CWE-168: Improper Handling of Inconsistent Special Elements

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

Executive Impact

  • Availability,Access Control,Non-Repudiation: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart,Bypass Protection Mechanism,Hide Activities

Developer Pattern

CWE-168 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-168, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-168: Improper Handling of Inconsistent Special Elements

The product does not properly handle input in which an inconsistency exists between two or more special characters or reserved words.

An example of this problem would be if paired characters appear in the wrong order, or if the special characters are not properly nested.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Base
Status
Draft
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • Missing validation
  • Unsafe defaults
  • Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant

Remediation

  • Developers should anticipate that inconsistent special elements will be injected/manipulated in the input vectors of their product. Use an appropriate combination of denylists and allowlists to ensure only valid, expected and appropriate input is processed by the system.
  • Implementation: [object Object]
  • 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.

Open CWE CVE mapping

ATT&CK Relevance

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