Katalog CWE

CWE-41 · Słabość

Improper Resolution of Path Equivalence

Abstrakcja
Bazowa
Status
Niekompletny
Dodano
19 lipca 2006
Ostatnia zmiana
11 grudnia 2025

Podatności CVE z tą słabościąPełny wpis na cwe.mitre.org ↗

Opis

The product is vulnerable to file system contents disclosure through path equivalence. Path equivalence involves the use of special characters in file and directory names. The associated manipulations are intended to generate multiple names for the same object.

Path equivalence is usually employed in order to circumvent access controls expressed using an incomplete set of file name or file path representations. This is different from path traversal, wherein the manipulations are performed to generate a name for a different object.

Skutki

  • Confidentiality, Integrity, Access Control

    Read Files or Directories; Modify Files or Directories; Bypass Protection Mechanism

    An attacker may be able to traverse the file system to unintended locations and read or overwrite the contents of unexpected files. If the files are used for a security mechanism than an attacker may be able to bypass the mechanism.

Zapobieganie

  • Implementation · Input Validation

    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.

  • Implementation · Output Encoding

    Use and specify an output encoding that can be handled by the downstream component that is reading the output. Common encodings include ISO-8859-1, UTF-7, and UTF-8. When an encoding is not specified, a downstream component may choose a different encoding, either by assuming a default encoding or automatically inferring which encoding is being used, which can be erroneous. When the encodings are inconsistent, the downstream component might treat some character or byte sequences as special, even if they are not special in the original encoding. Attackers might then be able to exploit this discrepancy and conduct injection attacks; they even might be able to bypass protection mechanisms that assume the original encoding is also being used by the downstream component.

  • Implementation · Input Validation

    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.

Przykłady podatności

Słabość nadrzędna

Słabości podrzędne

Kiedy powstaje

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific

Uwagi

Some of these manipulations could be effective in path traversal issues, too.

Źródła

  1. State-of-the-Art Resources (SOAR) for Software Vulnerability Detection, Test, and Evaluation — Gregory Larsen, E. Kenneth Hong Fong, David A. Wheeler, Rama S. Moorthy, 2014

Wpis z katalogu CWE 4.20.