The product receives input or data, but it does not validate or incorrectly validates that the input has the properties that are required to process the data safely and correctly.
+ Extended Description
Input validation is a frequently-used technique for checking potentially dangerous inputs in order to ensure that the inputs are safe for processing within the code, or when communicating with other components. When software does not validate input properly, an attacker is able to craft the input in a form that is not expected by the rest of the application. This will lead to parts of the system receiving unintended input, which may result in altered control flow, arbitrary control of a resource, or arbitrary code execution.
Input validation is not the only technique for processing input, however. Other techniques attempt to transform potentially-dangerous input into something safe, such as filtering (CWE-790) - which attempts to remove dangerous inputs - or encoding/escaping (CWE-116), which attempts to ensure that the input is not misinterpreted when it is included in output to another component. Other techniques exist as well (see CWE-138 for more examples.)