The user interface (UI) does not properly represent critical information to the user, allowing the information - or its source - to be obscured or spoofed. This is often a component in phishing attacks.

If an attacker can cause the UI to display erroneous data, or to otherwise convince the user to display information that appears to come from a trusted source, then the attacker could trick the user into performing the wrong action. This is often a component in phishing attacks, but other kinds of problems exist. For example, if the UI is used to monitor the security state of a system or network, then omitting or obscuring an important indicator could prevent the user from detecting and reacting to a security-critical event.
UI misrepresentation can take many forms:

Incorrect indicator: incorrect information is displayed, which prevents the user from understanding the true state of the product or the environment the product is monitoring, especially of potentially-dangerous conditions or operations. This can be broken down into several different subtypes.
Overlay: an area of the display is intended to give critical information, but another process can modify the display by overlaying another element on top of it. The user is not interacting with the expected portion of the user interface. This is the problem that enables clickjacking attacks, although many other types of attacks exist that involve overlay.
Icon manipulation: the wrong icon, or the wrong color indicator, can be influenced (such as making a dangerous .EXE executable look like a harmless .GIF)
Timing: the product is performing a state transition or context switch that is presented to the user with an indicator, but a race condition can cause the wrong indicator to be used before the product has fully switched context. The race window could be extended indefinitely if the attacker can trigger an error.
Visual truncation: important information could be truncated from the display, such as a long filename with a dangerous extension that is not displayed in the GUI because the malicious portion is truncated. The use of excessive whitespace can also cause truncation, or place the potentially-dangerous indicator outside of the user's field of view (e.g. "filename.txt .exe"). A different type of truncation can occur when a portion of the information is removed due to reasons other than length, such as the accidental insertion of an end-of-input marker in the middle of an input, such as a NUL byte in a C-style string.
Visual distinction: visual information might be presented in a way that makes it difficult for the user to quickly and correctly distinguish between critical and unimportant segments of the display.
Homographs: letters from different character sets, fonts, or languages can appear very similar (i.e. may be visually equivalent) in a way that causes the human user to misread the text (for example, to conduct phishing attacks to trick a user into visiting a malicious web site with a visually-similar name as a trusted site). This can be regarded as a type of visual distinction issue.

Primary

Resultant

Architecture and Design

Implementation

Non-Repudiation
Access Control
Hide Activities
Bypass Protection Mechanism

Implementation
Input Validation
Perform data validation (e.g. syntax, length, etc.) before interpreting the data.

Architecture and Design
Output Encoding
Create a strategy for presenting information, and plan for how to display unusual characters.

CVE-2004-2227
Web browser's filename selection dialog only shows the beginning portion of long filenames, which can trick users into launching executables with dangerous extensions.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-2227

CVE-2001-0398
Attachment with many spaces in filename bypasses "dangerous content" warning and uses different icon. Likely resultant.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2001-0398

CVE-2001-0643
Misrepresentation and equivalence issue.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2001-0643

CVE-2005-0593
Lock spoofing from several different weaknesses.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-0593

CVE-2004-1104
Incorrect indicator: web browser can be tricked into presenting the wrong URL
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-1104

CVE-2005-0143
Incorrect indicator: Lock icon displayed when an insecure page loads a binary file loaded from a trusted site.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-0143

CVE-2005-0144
Incorrect indicator: Secure "lock" icon is presented for one channel, while an insecure page is being simultaneously loaded in another channel.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-0144

CVE-2004-0761
Incorrect indicator: Certain redirect sequences cause security lock icon to appear in web browser, even when page is not encrypted.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-0761

CVE-2004-2219
Incorrect indicator: Spoofing via multi-step attack that causes incorrect information to be displayed in browser address bar.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-2219

CVE-2004-0537
Overlay: Wide "favorites" icon can overlay and obscure address bar
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-0537

CVE-2005-2271
Visual distinction: Web browsers do not clearly associate a Javascript dialog box with the web page that generated it, allowing spoof of the source of the dialog. "origin validation error" of a sort?
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-2271

CVE-2005-2272
Visual distinction: Web browsers do not clearly associate a Javascript dialog box with the web page that generated it, allowing spoof of the source of the dialog. "origin validation error" of a sort?
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-2272

CVE-2005-2273
Visual distinction: Web browsers do not clearly associate a Javascript dialog box with the web page that generated it, allowing spoof of the source of the dialog. "origin validation error" of a sort?
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-2273

CVE-2005-2274
Visual distinction: Web browsers do not clearly associate a Javascript dialog box with the web page that generated it, allowing spoof of the source of the dialog. "origin validation error" of a sort?
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-2274

CVE-2001-1410
Visual distinction: Browser allows attackers to create chromeless windows and spoof victim's display using unprotected Javascript method.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2001-1410

CVE-2002-0197
Visual distinction: Chat client allows remote attackers to spoof encrypted, trusted messages with lines that begin with a special sequence, which makes the message appear legitimate.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2002-0197

CVE-2005-0831
Visual distinction: Product allows spoofing names of other users by registering with a username containing hex-encoded characters.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-0831

CVE-2003-1025
Visual truncation: Special character in URL causes web browser to truncate the user portion of the "user@domain" URL, hiding real domain in the address bar.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2003-1025

CVE-2005-0243
Visual truncation: Chat client does not display long filenames in file dialog boxes, allowing dangerous extensions via manipulations including (1) many spaces and (2) multiple file extensions.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-0243

CVE-2005-1575
Visual truncation: Web browser file download type can be hidden using whitespace.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-1575

CVE-2004-2530
Visual truncation: Visual truncation in chat client using whitespace to hide dangerous file extension.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-2530

CVE-2005-0590
Visual truncation: Dialog box in web browser allows user to spoof the hostname via a long "user:pass" sequence in the URL, which appears before the real hostname.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-0590

CVE-2004-1451
Visual truncation: Null character in URL prevents entire URL from being displayed in web browser.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-1451

CVE-2004-2258
Miscellaneous -- [step-based attack, GUI] -- Password-protected tab can be bypassed by switching to another tab, then back to original tab.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2004-2258

CVE-2005-1678
Miscellaneous -- Dangerous file extensions not displayed.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2005-1678

CVE-2002-0722
Miscellaneous -- Web browser allows remote attackers to misrepresent the source of a file in the File Download dialog box.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2002-0722

UI Misrepresentation of Critical Information

Allowed-with-Review
This CWE entry is a Class and might have Base-level children that would be more appropriate
Examine children of this entry to see if there is a better fit

This entry should be broken down into more precise entries. See extended description.
Misrepresentation problems are frequently studied in web browsers, but there are no known efforts for classifying these kinds of problems in terms of the shortcomings of the interface. In addition, many misrepresentation issues are resultant.

PLOVER
2006-07-19
Draft 3
2006-07-19

Eric Dalci
Cigital
2008-07-01
updated Potential_Mitigations, Time_of_Introduction

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2008-09-08
updated Maintenance_Notes, Relationships, Other_Notes, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-01
updated Common_Consequences

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-05-11
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-10-30
updated Potential_Mitigations

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2014-02-13
Critical
Defined several different subtypes of this issue.

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2014-02-18
updated Applicable_Platforms, Description, Maintenance_Notes, Name, Observed_Examples, Other_Notes, References, Relationships, Research_Gaps

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2014-07-30
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2017-01-19
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2017-11-08
updated Observed_Examples, References, Relationships, Type

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2020-02-24
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2021-03-15
updated Maintenance_Notes, Observed_Examples

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2021-10-28
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2022-04-28
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-01-31
updated Description, Related_Attack_Patterns

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-04-27
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-06-29
updated Mapping_Notes

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2025-09-09
4.18
2025-09-09
updated References

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2025-12-11
4.19
2025-12-11
updated Applicable_Platforms, Relationships, Weakness_Ordinalities

UI Misrepresentation of Critical Information