CWE-76Improper Neutralization of Equivalent Special Elements

Abstraction: Base · CVEs in our corpus: 16

The product correctly neutralizes certain special elements, but it improperly neutralizes equivalent special elements.

The product may have a fixed list of special characters it believes is complete. However, there may be alternate encodings, or representations that also have the same meaning. For example, the product may filter out a leading slash (/) to prevent absolute path names, but does not account for a tilde (~) followed by a user name, which on some *nix systems could be expanded to an absolute pathname. Alternately, the product might filter a dangerous "-e" command-line switch when calling an external program, but it might not account for "--exec" or other switches that have the same semantics.

Last updated: 15 October 2026 14:21 UTC

OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)

This weakness contributes to A05:2025 Injection.

Control responseHuman-reviewed

Answering this weakness across the control lifecycle, from our framework cross-walks.

Prevent

Stop it (NIST 800-53 / CSF Protect)

PR.PS-06
SA-11 Developer Testing and Evaluation
SI-10 Information Input Validation
SA-8 Security and Privacy Engineering Principles

Detect

Catch it (CSF Detect / Respond)

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Harden

Shrink the surface (DISA STIG)

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Validate

Prove the fix (OWASP ASVS)

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NIST 800-53 r5 controls PROPOSED for this weakness (0)AI-assisted

These are model PROPOSALS, not graded mappings. They come from controls_to_cwe_proposals, which carries no grade field at all; across the CWE pages 1,540 of 1,722 such associations (89%) have never been graded by anything. The heading said “address” until 2026-09-29, which asserted a relationship the data does not carry. Graded cross-walks are on the framework map, not here.

Control	Title	Family	Why it addresses this CWE
No NIST controls proposed yet.

Top CVEs of this weakness type, ranked by Risk Priority

CVE	Risk	CVSS	EPSS	Published
`CVE-2024-34359`	8.2	9.6	0.2600	2024-05-14
`CVE-2026-28292`	7.6	9.8	0.0135	2026-03-10
`CVE-2024-2952`	7.5	9.8	0.0127	2024-04-10
`CVE-2024-1883`	7.3	6.3	0.6147	2024-03-14
`CVE-2026-91184`	6.6	8.8	0.0048	2026-10-14
`CVE-2024-4897`	6.3	8.4	0.0045	2024-07-02
`CVE-2026-55723`	6.3	8.3	0.0051	2026-07-15
`CVE-2026-77180`	6.3	8.3	0.0050	2026-09-02
`CVE-2026-11311`	6.2	8.1	0.0057	2026-06-17
`CVE-2026-66362`	6.2	8.1	0.0057	2026-09-02
`CVE-2024-1882`	5.7	7.2	0.0141	2024-03-14
`CVE-2023-0493`	5.3	5.3	0.0790	2023-01-26
`CVE-2024-21600`	5.0	6.5	0.0032	2024-01-12
`CVE-2023-1149`	4.3	5.4	0.0055	2023-03-02
`CVE-2024-1221`	2.9	3.1	0.0055	2024-03-14