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CWE Reference

CWE-237: Improper Handling of Structural Elements

Official CWE-237 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessIncomplete
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Glexia's Take

CWE-237: Improper Handling of Structural Elements

Improper Handling of Structural Elements 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-237 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-237, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-237: Improper Handling of Structural Elements

The product does not handle or incorrectly handles inputs that are related to complex structures.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Base
Status
Incomplete
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • In the following C/C++ example the method processMessageFromSocket() will get a message from a socket, placed into a buffer, and will parse the contents of the buffer into a structure that contains the message length and the message body. A for loop is used to copy the message body into a local character string which will be passed to another method for processing. However, the message length variable (msgLength) from the structure is used as the condition for ending the for loop without validating that msgLength accurately reflects the actual length of the message body (CWE-606). If msgLength indicates a length that is longer than the size of a message body (CWE-130), then this can result in a buffer over-read by reading past the end of the buffer (CWE-126).

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

Related CVEs

Related CVE mappings appear after CVE records are cross-indexed.

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ATT&CK Relevance

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