Weakness (CWE)
CWE-178: Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity
The product does not properly account for differences in case sensitivity when accessing or determining the properties of a resource, leading to inconsistent results.
How to prevent it (3 mitigations)
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Architecture and Design
Avoid making decisions based on names of resources (e.g. files) if those resources can have alternate names.
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Implementation
Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does.
When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue."
Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
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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.
Source: MITRE CWE-178
64 results · Clear filters · Feed
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High 7.5
Apache Tomcat: LockOutRealm treats user names as case-sensitive
Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity vulnerability in LockOutRealm in Apache Tomcat. This issue affects Apache Tomcat: from 11.0.0-M1 through 11.0.21, from 10.1.0-M1 through 10.1.54, from 9.0.0.M1 through 9.0.117, from 8.5.0 through 8.5.100, from 7.0.0 throu…
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High 7.8
Heimdall: Case-sensitive host matching may lead to policy bypass
Heimdall is a cloud native Identity Aware Proxy and Access Control Decision service. Prior to version 0.17.14, Heimdall performs host matching in a case-sensitive manner, while HTTP hostnames are case-insensitive. This discrepancy can result in heimdall faili…
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High 7.8
Heimdall: Case-sensitive handling of URL-encoded slashes may lead to inconsistent path interpretation
Heimdall is a cloud native Identity Aware Proxy and Access Control Decision service. Prior to version 0.17.14, Heimdall handles URL-encoded slashes (%2F) in a case-sensitive manner, while percent-encoding is defined to be case-insensitive. As a result, the lo…
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High —
Gotenberg has incomplete fix for ExifTool arbitrary file write: case-insensitive bypass and missing HardLink/SymLink tags
## Summary The fix for ExifTool arbitrary file write (commit `043b158`, released in v8.29.0) uses a case-sensitive blocklist to filter dangerous pseudo-tags. ExifTool processes tag names case-insensitively, so alternate casings bypass the filter. The blocklis…
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High 8.1
prompts.chat Identity Confusion via Case-Sensitive Username Handling
prompts.chat prior to commit 1464475, contains an identity confusion vulnerability due to inconsistent case-sensitive and case-insensitive handling of usernames across write and read paths, allowing attackers to create case-variant usernames that bypass uniqu…
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High 7.7
DataEase is Vulnerable to H2 JDBC RCE Bypass
DataEase is an open source data visualization analysis tool. Versions 2.10.19 and below have inconsistent Locale handling between the JDBC URL validation logic and the H2 JDBC engine's internal parsing. DataEase uses String.toUpperCase() without specifying an…
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High 7.5
Traefik: lowercase `Connection` tokens can delete traefik-managed forwarded identity headers (for example, `X-Real-Ip`)
Traefik is an HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer. From version 2.11.9 to 2.11.37 and from version 3.1.3 to 3.6.8, there is a potential vulnerability in Traefik managing the Connection header with X-Forwarded headers. When Traefik processes HTTP/1.1 requests…
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High 7.0
MCP Go SDK Vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity
The Go MCP SDK used Go's standard encoding/json.Unmarshal for JSON-RPC and MCP protocol message parsing in versions prior to 1.3.1. Go's standard library performs case-insensitive matching of JSON keys to struct field tags — a field tagged json:"method" would…
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High 7.7
Caddy: MatchHost becomes case-sensitive for large host lists (>100), enabling host-based route/auth bypass
Caddy is an extensible server platform that uses TLS by default. Prior to version 2.11.1, Caddy's HTTP `host` request matcher is documented as case-insensitive, but when configured with a large host list (>100 entries) it becomes case-sensitive due to an opti…
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High 7.7
Caddy: MatchPath %xx (escaped-path) branch skips case normalization, enabling path-based route/auth bypass
Caddy is an extensible server platform that uses TLS by default. Prior to version 2.11.1, Caddy's HTTP `path` request matcher is intended to be case-insensitive, but when the match pattern contains percent-escape sequences (`%xx`) it compares against the requ…
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High 7.5
SiYuan has a File Read Interface Case Bypass Vulnerability
SiYuan is a personal knowledge management system. Prior to 3.5.5, the /api/file/getFile endpoint uses case-sensitive string equality checks to block access to sensitive files. On case-insensitive file systems such as Windows, attackers can bypass restrictions…
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High 8.7
Formio improperly authorized permission elevation through specially crafted request path
Form.io is a combined Form and API platform for Serverless applications. Versions 3.5.6 and below and 4.0.0-rc.1 through 4.4.2 contain a flaw in path handling which could allow an attacker to access protected API endpoints by sending a crafted request path. A…
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High 8.1
Cursor IDE: Sensitive File Overwrite Bypass is Possible
Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. Versions 1.6.23 and below contain case-sensitive checks in the way Cursor IDE protects its sensitive files (e.g., */.cursor/mcp.json), which allows attackers to modify the content of these files through p…
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High 7.1
Cursor CLI Agent: Sensitive File Overwrite Bypass
Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. In versions 1.7 and below, a vulnerability in the way Cursor CLI Agent protects its sensitive files (i.e. */.cursor/cli.json) allows attackers to modify the content of the files through prompt injection, …
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High 7.3CVE-2025-46701 Public exploit
Apache Tomcat: Security constraint bypass for CGI scripts
Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity vulnerability in Apache Tomcat's GCI servlet allows security constraint bypass of security constraints that apply to the pathInfo component of a URI mapped to the CGI servlet. This issue affects Apache Tomcat: from 11.0.0…
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High 8.8
Improper handling of case sensitivity in Jenkins OpenId Connect Authentication Plugin
Jenkins OpenId Connect Authentication Plugin 4.452.v2849b_d3945fa_ and earlier, except 4.438.440.v3f5f201de5dc, treats usernames as case-insensitive, allowing attackers on Jenkins instances configured with a case-sensitive OpenID Connect provider to log in as…
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High 8.7
Gradio Blocked Path ACL Bypass Vulnerability
Gradio is an open-source Python package that allows quick building of demos and web application for machine learning models, API, or any arbitrary Python function. Gradio's Access Control List (ACL) for file paths can be bypassed by altering the letter case o…
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High 8.1
Drupal core - Moderately critical - Access bypass - SA-CORE-2024-004
A vulnerability in Drupal Core allows Privilege Escalation.This issue affects Drupal Core: from 8.0.0 before 10.2.11, from 10.3.0 before 10.3.9, from 11.0.0 before 11.0.8.
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High 7.5
Vite dev server option `server.fs.deny` can be bypassed when hosted on case-insensitive filesystem
Vite is a frontend tooling framework for javascript. The Vite dev server option `server.fs.deny` can be bypassed on case-insensitive file systems using case-augmented versions of filenames. Notably this affects servers hosted on Windows. This bypass is simila…
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High 8.8
Improper handling of case insensitive filesystems in Eclipse JGit allows arbitrary file write
Arbitrary File Overwrite in Eclipse JGit <= 6.6.0 In Eclipse JGit, all versions <= 6.6.0.202305301015-r, a symbolic link present in a specially crafted git repository can be used to write a file to locations outside the working tree when this repository is cl…
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High 7.5CVE-2022-22968 Public exploit
Improper handling of case sensitivity in Spring Framework
In Spring Framework versions 5.3.0 - 5.3.18, 5.2.0 - 5.2.20, and older unsupported versions, the patterns for disallowedFields on a DataBinder are case sensitive which means a field is not effectively protected unless it is listed with both upper and lower ca…
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High 8.2
UNIX Symbolic Link (Symlink) Following in @npmcli/arborist
`@npmcli/arborist`, the library that calculates dependency trees and manages the `node_modules` folder hierarchy for the npm command line interface, aims to guarantee that package dependency contracts will be met, and the extraction of package contents will a…
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High 8.3
Authorization Policy Bypass Due to Case Insensitive Host Comparison
Istio is an open source platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. According to [RFC 4343](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4343), Istio aut…
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High 7.5
Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) allows remote attackers to bypass content filtering via attachments whose Content-Type and Cont…