CWE-624: Executable Regular Expression Error | Glexia
CWE-624 (Executable Regular Expression Error) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-624: Executable Regular Expression Error
Executable Regular Expression Error represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Integrity,Availability: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
Developer Pattern
CWE-624 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-624, 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-624: Executable Regular Expression Error
The product uses a regular expression that either (1) contains an executable component with user-controlled inputs, or (2) allows a user to enable execution by inserting pattern modifiers.
Case (2) is possible in the PHP preg_replace() function, and possibly in other languages when a user-controlled input is inserted into a string that is later parsed as a regular expression.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Implementation: The regular expression feature in some languages allows inputs to be quoted or escaped before insertion, such as \Q and \E in Perl.
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.