Weakness · High
CWE-321: Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key
What it is
The product uses a hard-coded, unchangeable cryptographic key.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- High
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design
- Exploited in the wild
- 1 known exploited CVE
What an attacker can do
- Bypass Protection Mechanism (Access Control)
- Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)
- Read Application Data (Access Control)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Prevention schemes mirror that of hard-coded password storage.
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.)
Exploited in the wild: 1 CVE
Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-321 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.
H2 Security
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.