1428
Potential Mitigations
Phase: Architecture and Design
Make access control policy based on path information in canonical form. Use very restrictive
regular expressions to validate that the path is in the expected form.
Phase: Architecture and Design
Reject all alternate path encodings that are not in the expected canonical form.
Demonstrative Examples
Example 1:
Example from CAPEC (CAPEC ID: 4, "Using Alternative IP Address Encodings"). An attacker
identifies an application server that applies a security policy based on the domain and application
name, so the access control policy covers authentication and authorization for anyone accessing
http://example.domain:8080/application. However, by putting in the IP address of the host the
application authentication and authorization controls may be bypassed http://192.168.0.1:8080/
application. The attacker relies on the victim applying policy to the namespace abstraction and not
having a default deny policy in place to manage exceptions.
MemberOf Relationships
This MemberOf relationships table shows additional CWE Catgeories and Views that reference this
weakness as a member. This information is often useful in understanding where a weakness fits
within the context of external information sources.
Nature Type ID Name Page
MemberOf 845 The CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for
Java (2011) Chapter 2 - Input Validation and Data
Sanitization (IDS)
844 2362
MemberOf 949 SFP Secondary Cluster: Faulty Endpoint Authentication 888 2395
MemberOf 1147 SEI CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Java -
Guidelines 13. Input Output (FIO)
1133 2450
MemberOf 1396 Comprehensive Categorization: Access Control 1400 2519
Taxonomy Mappings
Mapped Taxonomy Name Node ID Fit Mapped Node Name
The CERT Oracle Secure
Coding Standard for Java
(2011)
IDS02-J Canonicalize path names before
validating them
CWE-648: Incorrect Use of Privileged APIs
Weakness ID : 648
Structure : Simple
Abstraction : Base
Description
The product does not conform to the API requirements for a function call that requires extra
privileges. This could allow attackers to gain privileges by causing the function to be called
incorrectly.
Extended Description
When a product contains certain functions that perform operations requiring an elevated level of
privilege, the caller of a privileged API must be careful to:
• ensure that assumptions made by the APIs are valid, such as validity of arguments
CWE Version 4.14
CWE-648: Incorrect Use of Privileged APIs
CWE-648: Incorrect Use of Privileged APIs