Weakness · High

CWE-180: Incorrect Behavior Order: Validate Before Canonicalize

What it is

The product validates input before it is canonicalized, which prevents the product from detecting data that becomes invalid after the canonicalization step.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
High
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Implementation
Exploited in the wild
No CVE in CISA's catalog

In more detail

This can be used by an attacker to bypass the validation and launch attacks that expose weaknesses that would otherwise be prevented, such as injection.

What an attacker can do

  • Bypass Protection Mechanism (Access Control)

How to prevent it

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.

CWE-180 on MITRE's CWE site

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.