CWE-241: Improper Handling of Unexpected Data Type
Official CWE-241 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-241: Improper Handling of Unexpected Data Type
Improper Handling of Unexpected Data Type represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Other: Varies by Context,Unexpected State
Developer Pattern
CWE-241 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-241, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-241: Improper Handling of Unexpected Data Type
The product does not handle or incorrectly handles when a particular element is not the expected type, e.g. it expects a digit (0-9) but is provided with a letter (A-Z).
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- 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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.