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Weakness · High

CWE-269: Improper Privilege Management

What it is

The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor.

Likelihood of exploit: Medium19 exploited in the wildMITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
High
Likelihood of exploit
Medium
Introduced during
Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild
19 known exploited CVEs

What an attacker can do

  • Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

  • Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.
  • Follow the principle of least privilege when assigning access rights to entities in a software system.
  • Consider following the principle of separation of privilege. Require multiple conditions to be met before permitting access to a system resource.

How to find it

  • Automated Static Analysis. Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)

CWE-269 on MITRE's CWE site

Exploited in the wild: 19 CVEs

Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-269 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.

All known exploited vulnerabilities

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.