CWE-155
Improper Neutralization of Wildcards or Matching Symbols
Extended description
As data is parsed, an injected element may cause the process to take unexpected actions.
Common consequences1
- IntegrityUnexpected State
Potential mitigations4
Developers should anticipate that wildcard or matching elements will be injected/removed/manipulated in the input vectors of their product. Use an appropriate combination of denylists and allowlists to ensure only valid, expected and appropriate input is processed by the system.
- Implementation
Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does. When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue." Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
- Implementation
While it is risky to use dynamically-generated query strings, code, or commands that mix control and data together, sometimes it may be unavoidable. Properly quote arguments and escape any special characters within those arguments. The most conservative approach is to escape or filter all characters that do not pass an extremely strict allowlist (such as everything that is not alphanumeric or white space). If some special characters are still needed, such as white space, wrap each argument in quotes after the escaping/filtering step. Be careful of argument injection (CWE-88).
- Implementation
Inputs should be decoded and canonicalized to the application's current internal representation before being validated (CWE-180). Make sure that the application does not decode the same input twice (CWE-174). Such errors could be used to bypass allowlist validation schemes by introducing dangerous inputs after they have been checked.
Relationships1
- ChildOfCWE-138
CVEs referencing this CWE15
| CVE | Description | Severity | EPSS | Flags | Modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2020-1772 | It's possible to craft Lost Password requests with wildcards in the Token value, which allows attacker to retrieve valid Token(s), generated by users which already requested new passwords. This issue affects: ((OTRS)) Community Edition 5.0.41 and prior versions, 6.0.26 and prior versions. OTRS: 7.0.15 and prior versions. | HIGH7.5 | 1.62%p73 | 2024-11-21 | |
| CVE-2022-21646 | SpiceDB is a database system for managing security-critical application permissions. Any user making use of a wildcard relationship under the right hand branch of an `exclusion` or within an `intersection` operation will see `Lookup`/`LookupResources` return a resource as "accessible" if it is *not* accessible by virtue of the inclusion of the wildcard in the intersection or the right side of the exclusion. In `v1.3.0`, the wildcard is ignored entirely in lookup's dispatch, resulting in the `banned` wildcard being ignored in the exclusion. Version 1.4.0 contains a patch for this issue. As a workaround, don't make use of wildcards on the right side of intersections or within exclusions. | HIGH8.1 | 1.47%p70 | 2025-04-23 | |
| CVE-2019-3802 | This affects Spring Data JPA in versions up to and including 2.1.6, 2.0.14 and 1.11.20. ExampleMatcher using ExampleMatcher.StringMatcher.STARTING, ExampleMatcher.StringMatcher.ENDING or ExampleMatcher.StringMatcher.CONTAINING could return more results than anticipated when a maliciously crafted example value is supplied. | MEDIUM5.3 | 1.25%p65 | 2024-11-21 | |
| CVE-2025-27515 | Laravel is a web application framework. When using wildcard validation to validate a given file or image field (`files.*`), a user-crafted malicious request could potentially bypass the validation rules. This vulnerability is fixed in 11.44.1 and 12.1.1. | CRITICAL9.8 | 0.69%p48 | PoC | 2025-08-26 |
| CVE-2024-0055 | Sandro Poppi, member of the AXIS OS Bug Bounty Program, has found that the VAPIX APIs mediaclip.cgi and playclip.cgi was vulnerable for file globbing which could lead to a resource exhaustion attack. Axis has released patched AXIS OS versions for the highlighted flaw. Please refer to the Axis security advisory for more information and solution. | MEDIUM6.5 | 0.60%p44 | 2026-01-13 | |
| CVE-2024-0054 | Sandro Poppi, member of the AXIS OS Bug Bounty Program, has found that the VAPIX APIs local_list.cgi, create_overlay.cgi and irissetup.cgi was vulnerable for file globbing which could lead to a resource exhaustion attack. Axis has released patched AXIS OS versions for the highlighted flaw. Please refer to the Axis security advisory for more information and solution. | MEDIUM6.5 | 0.57%p43 | 2026-04-15 | |
| CVE-2025-0106 | A wildcard expansion vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks Expedition allows an unauthenticated attacker to enumerate files on the host filesystem. | MEDIUM5.3 | 0.47%p37 | 2026-01-23 | |
| CVE-2025-4232 | An improper neutralization of wildcards vulnerability in the log collection feature of Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect™ app on macOS allows a non administrative user to escalate their privileges to root. | HIGH8.8 | 0.42%p33 | 2026-02-26 | |
| CVE-2024-6509 | Marinus Pfund, member of the AXIS OS Bug Bounty Program, has found the VAPIX API alwaysmulti.cgi was vulnerable for file globbing which could lead to resource exhaustion of the Axis device. Axis has released patched AXIS OS versions for the highlighted flaw. Please refer to the Axis security advisory for more information and solution. | MEDIUM6.5 | 0.39%p31 | 2026-04-15 | |
| CVE-2024-47791 | Ruijie Reyee OS versions 2.206.x up to but not including 2.320.x could allow an attacker to subscribe to partial possible topics in Ruijie MQTT broker, and receive partial messages being sent to and from devices. | MEDIUM5.3 | 0.38%p30 | 2024-12-10 | |
| CVE-2025-24376 | kubewarden-controller is a Kubernetes controller that allows you to dynamically register Kubewarden admission policies. By design, AdmissionPolicy and AdmissionPolicyGroup can evaluate only namespaced resources. The resources to be evaluated are determined by the rules provided by the user when defining the policy. There might be Kubernetes namespaced resources that should not be validated by AdmissionPolicy and by the AdmissionPolicyGroup policies because of their sensitive nature. For example, PolicyReport are namespaced resources that contain the list of non compliant objects found inside of a namespace. An attacker can use either an AdmissionPolicy or an AdmissionPolicyGroup to prevent the creation and update of PolicyReport objects to hide non-compliant resources. Moreover, the same attacker might use a mutating AdmissionPolicy to alter the contents of the PolicyReport created inside of the namespace. Starting from the 1.21.0 release, the validation rules applied to AdmissionPolicy and AdmissionPolicyGroup have been tightened to prevent them from validating sensitive types of namespaced resources. | MEDIUM6.5 | 0.32%p24 | 2026-04-15 | |
| CVE-2025-11757 | The CloudEdge Cloud does not sanitize the MQTT topic input, which could allow an attacker to leverage the MQTT wildcard to receive all the messages that should be delivered to other users by subscribing to the a MQTT topic. In these messages, the attacker can obtain the credentials and key information to connect to the cameras from peer to peer. | NONE | 0.27%p18 | 2026-04-15 | |
| CVE-2024-8688 | An improper neutralization of matching symbols vulnerability in the Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS command line interface (CLI) enables authenticated administrators (including read-only administrators) with access to the CLI to to read arbitrary files on the firewall. | MEDIUM4.4 | 0.24%p14 | 2024-10-03 | |
| CVE-2026-49482 | ClipBucket v5 is an open source video sharing platform. Prior to version 5.5.3 - #141, ClipBucket v5 contains an improper neutralization of SQL wildcard characters in the subtitle editing endpoint. An authenticated user can send a % character as the number parameter to overwrite all subtitle titles of any video they own in a single HTTP request. This issue has been patched in version 5.5.3 - #141. | MEDIUM4.3 | 0.17%p7 | 2026-06-12 | |
| CVE-2025-0681 | The Cloud MQTT service of the affected products supports wildcard topic subscription which could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information from tapping the service communications. | MEDIUM6.2 | 0.17%p6 | 2026-04-15 |