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CWE-142: Failure to Sanitize Value Delimiters

Individual Definition in a New Window
Failure to Sanitize Value Delimiters
Status: Draft
Weakness ID: 142 (Weakness Variant)
Description
Summary

Value delimiters injected into an application can be used to compromise a system. As data is parsed, an injected/absent/malformed delimiter may cause the process to take unexpected actions.

Potential Mitigations

Developers should anticipate that value delimiters will be injected/removed/manipulated in the input vectors of their software system. Use an appropriate combination of black lists and white lists to ensure only valid, expected and appropriate input is processed by the system.

Assume all input is malicious. Use a standard input validation mechanism to validate all input for length, type, syntax, and business rules before accepting the data to be diplayed or stored. Use an "accept known good" validation strategy.

Use and specify a strong output encoding (such as ISO 8859-1 or UTF 8).

Do not rely exclusively on blacklist validation to detect malicious input or to encode output. There are too many variants to encode a character; you're likely to miss some variants.

Inputs should be decoded and canonicalized to the application's current internal representation before being validated. Make sure that your application does not decode the same input twice. Such errors could be used to bypass whitelist schemes by introducing dangerous inputs after they have been checked.

Observed Examples
ReferenceDescription
Multiple internal space, insufficient quoting - program does not use proper delimiter between values.
Relationships
NatureTypeIDNameView(s) this relationship pertains toView(s)
ChildOfWeakness BaseWeakness BaseWeakness Base140Failure to Sanitize Delimiters
Development Concepts (primary)699
Research Concepts (primary)1000
Taxonomy Mappings
Mapped Taxonomy NameMapped Node Name
PLOVERValue Delimiter
Applicable Platforms
Languages
All
Time of Introduction
* Implementation
Content History
Submissions
PLOVER. (Externally Mined)
Modifications
Eric Dalci. Cigital. 2008-07-01. (External)
updated Potential_Mitigations, Time_of_Introduction
CWE Content Team. MITRE. 2008-09-08. (Internal)
updated Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings
Previous Entry Names
* Value Delimiter (changed 2008-04-11)
Page Last Updated: September 10, 2008