Weakness · High
CWE-324: Use of a Key Past its Expiration Date
What it is
The product uses a cryptographic key or password past its expiration date, which diminishes its safety significantly by increasing the timing window for cracking attacks against that key.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- Low
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design
- Exploited in the wild
- 1 known exploited CVE
In more detail
While the expiration of keys does not necessarily ensure that they are compromised, it is a significant concern that keys which remain in use for prolonged periods of time have a decreasing probability of integrity. For this reason, it is important to replace keys within a period of time proportional to their strength.
What an attacker can do
- Bypass Protection Mechanism (Access Control)
- Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Adequate consideration should be put in to the user interface in order to notify users previous to the key's expiration, to explain the importance of new key generation and to walk users through the process as painlessly as possible.
Exploited in the wild: 1 CVE
Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-324 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.
H2 Security
Found it in your code?
We review where it appears, fix it with your team, and check it was not already used against you.
Talk to our teamT Academy
Stop writing it in the first place
Learn to build software and systems without weaknesses like this one, with practice on real hosts in your browser, every objective checked on the machine.
Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.