CWE · MITRE source

CWE-1289Improper Validation of Unsafe Equivalence in Input

Abstraction: Base · CVEs in our corpus: 34

The product receives an input value that is used as a resource identifier or other type of reference, but it does not validate or incorrectly validates that the input is equivalent to a potentially-unsafe value.

Attackers can sometimes bypass input validation schemes by finding inputs that appear to be safe, but will be dangerous when processed at a lower layer or by a downstream component. For example, a simple XSS protection mechanism might try to validate that an input has no "<script>" tags using case-sensitive matching, but since HTML is case-insensitive when processed by web browsers, an attacker could inject "<ScrIpT>" and trigger XSS.

Last updated: 21 August 2026 20:21 UTC