CWE-154: Improper Sanitization of Variable Name Delimiters
Improper Sanitization of Variable Name Delimiters
Weakness ID: 154 (Weakness Variant)
Status: Incomplete
Description
Description Summary
The software receives input from an upstream component, but it
does not sanitize or incorrectly sanitizes special elements that could be
interpreted as variable name delimiters when they are sent to a downstream
component.
Extended Description
As data is parsed, an injected delimiter may cause the process to take
unexpected actions that result in an attack. Example: "$" for an environment
variable.
Server trusts client to expand macros, allows
macro characters to be expanded to trigger resultant
infoleak.
Potential Mitigations
Phase
Description
Developers should anticipate that variable name 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.
Architecture and Design
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 displayed 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.