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Weakness (CWE)

CWE-76: Improper Neutralization of Equivalent Special Elements

Base Draft

The product correctly neutralizes certain special elements, but it improperly neutralizes equivalent special elements.

More detail

The product may have a fixed list of special characters it believes is complete. However, there may be alternate encodings, or representations that also have the same meaning. For example, the product may filter out a leading slash (/) to prevent absolute path names, but does not account for a tilde (~) followed by a user name, which on some *nix systems could be expanded to an absolute pathname. Alternately, the product might filter a dangerous "-e" command-line switch when calling an external program, but it might not account for "--exec" or other switches that have the same semantics.

How to prevent it (2 mitigations)

  1. Requirements

    Programming languages and supporting technologies might be chosen which are not subject to these issues.

  2. Implementation

    Utilize an appropriate mix of allowlist and denylist parsing to filter equivalent special element syntax from all input.

Source: MITRE CWE-76

All Critical High Medium Low Exploited only Public exploit

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  • Low 3.1
    CVE-2024-1221

    Improper access controls on APIs on Linux and macOS in PaperCut NG/MF

    This vulnerability potentially allows files on a PaperCut NG/MF server to be exposed using a specifically formed payload against the impacted API endpoint. The attacker must carry out some reconnaissance to gain knowledge of a system token. This CVE only affe…

    PaperCut PaperCut NG, PaperCut MF