CWE-230: Improper Handling of Missing Values | Glexia
CWE-230 (Improper Handling of Missing Values) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-230: Improper Handling of Missing Values
Improper Handling of Missing 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-230 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-230, 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-230: Improper Handling of Missing Values
The product does not handle or incorrectly handles when a parameter, field, or argument name is specified, but the associated value is missing, i.e. it is empty, blank, or null.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This Android application has registered to handle a URL when sent an intent: The application assumes the URL will always be included in the intent. When the URL is not present, the call to getStringExtra() will return null, thus causing a null pointer exception when length() is called.
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.