Weakness · Medium

CWE-284: Improper Access Control

What it is

The product does not restrict or incorrectly restricts access to a resource from an unauthorized actor.

37 exploited in the wildMITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating): Medium
Likelihood of exploit: Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during: Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild: 37 known exploited CVEs

In more detail

Access control involves the use of several protection mechanisms such as: Authentication (proving the identity of an actor) Authorization (ensuring that a given actor can access a resource), and Accountability (tracking of activities that were performed) When any mechanism is not applied or otherwise fails, attackers can compromise the security of the product by gaining privileges, reading sensitive information, executing commands, evading detection, etc. There are two distinct behaviors that can introduce access control weaknesses: Specification: incorrect privileges, permissions, ownership, etc. are explicitly specified for either the user or the resource (for example, setting a password file to be world-writable, or giving administrator capabilities to a guest user). This action could be performed by the program or the administrator. Enforcement: the mechanism contains errors that prevent it from properly enforcing the specified access control requirements (e.g., allowing the user to specify their own privileges, or allowing a syntactically-incorrect ACL to produce insecure settings). This problem occurs within the program itself, in that it does not actually enforce the intended security policy that the administrator specifies.

What an attacker can do

Varies by Context (Other)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.
Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area. Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

CWE-284 on MITRE's CWE site

Exploited in the wild: 37 CVEs

Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-284 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.