CWE-249: DEPRECATED: Often Misused: Path Manipulation

This entry was deprecated for several reasons. The primary
reason is over-loading of the "path manipulation" term and the
description. The original description for this entry was the
same as that for the "Often Misused: File System" item in the
original Seven Pernicious Kingdoms paper. However, Seven
Pernicious Kingdoms also has a "Path Manipulation" phrase that
is for external control of pathnames (CWE-73), which is a
factor in symbolic link following and path traversal, neither
of which is explicitly mentioned in 7PK. Fortify uses the
phrase "Often Misused: Path Manipulation" for a broader range
of problems, generally for issues related to buffer
management. Given the multiple conflicting uses of this term,
there is a chance that CWE users may have incorrectly mapped
to this entry.

The second reason for deprecation is an implied combination of
multiple weaknesses within buffer-handling functions. The
focus of this entry was generally on the path-conversion
functions and their association with buffer
overflows. However, some of Fortify's Vulncat entries have the
term "path manipulation" but describe a non-overflow weakness
in which the buffer is not guaranteed to contain the entire
pathname, i.e., there is information truncation (see CWE-222
for a similar concept). A new entry for this non-overflow
weakness may be created in a future version of CWE.