COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-228

Improper Handling of Syntactically Invalid Structure

The product does not handle or incorrectly handles input that is not syntactically well-formed with respect to the associated specification.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product does not handle or incorrectly handles input that is not syntactically well-formed with respect to the associated specification.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Unexpected StateDoS: Crash, Exit, or RestartDoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)

Affected security scopes: Integrity, Availability

If an input is syntactically invalid, then processing the input could place the system in an unexpected state that could lead to a crash, consume available system resources or other unintended behaviors.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

  • Follow secure coding guidelines for input handling and boundary checking.
  • Enforce strict security reviews and automated static analysis (SAST) checks.

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.)