COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-185

Incorrect Regular Expression

The product specifies a regular expression in a way that causes data to be improperly matched or compared.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product specifies a regular expression in a way that causes data to be improperly matched or compared.

Extended description

When the regular expression is used in protection mechanisms such as filtering or validation, this may allow an attacker to bypass the intended restrictions on the incoming data.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Unexpected StateVaries by Context

Affected security scopes: Other

When the regular expression is not correctly specified, data might have a different format or type than the rest of the program expects, producing resultant weaknesses or errors.
Bypass Protection Mechanism

Affected security scopes: Access Control

In PHP, regular expression checks can sometimes be bypassed with a null byte, leading to any number of weaknesses.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Implementation

Refactoring

Detail
Regular expressions can become error prone when defining a complex language even for those experienced in writing grammars. Determine if several smaller regular expressions simplify one large regular expression. Also, subject the regular expression to thorough testing techniques such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, and robustness. After testing and a reasonable confidence level is achieved, a regular expression may not be foolproof. If an exploit is allowed to slip through, then record the exploit and refactor the regular expression.

Verification

How is it detected?

Automated Static Analysis

High
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.)