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CWE Reference

CWE-40: Path Traversal: '\\UNC\share\name\' (Windows UNC Share)

Official CWE-40 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessDraft
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Glexia's Take

CWE-40: Path Traversal: '\\UNC\share\name\' (Windows UNC Share)

Path Traversal: '\\UNC\share\name\' (Windows UNC Share) represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Confidentiality,Integrity: Read Files or Directories,Modify Files or Directories

Developer Pattern

CWE-40 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-40, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-40: Path Traversal: '\\UNC\share\name\' (Windows UNC Share)

The product accepts input that identifies a Windows UNC share ('\\UNC\share\name') that potentially redirects access to an unintended location or arbitrary file.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Variant
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

  • 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

  • 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

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ATT&CK Relevance

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