CWE-182: Collapse of Data into Unsafe Value
Official CWE-182 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-182: Collapse of Data into Unsafe Value
Collapse of Data into Unsafe Value represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism
Developer Pattern
CWE-182 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-182, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-182: Collapse of Data into Unsafe Value
The product filters data in a way that causes it to be reduced or "collapsed" into an unsafe value that violates an expected security property.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Avoid making decisions based on names of resources (e.g. files) if those resources can have alternate names.
- 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.
- Canonicalize the name to match that of the file system's representation of the name. This can sometimes be achieved with an available API (e.g. in Win32 the GetFullPathName function).
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.