Weakness · Medium

CWE-605: Multiple Binds to the Same Port

What it is

When multiple sockets are allowed to bind to the same port, other services on that port may be stolen or spoofed.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
Medium
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild
No CVE in CISA's catalog

In more detail

On most systems, a combination of setting the SO_REUSEADDR socket option, and a call to bind() allows any process to bind to a port to which a previous process has bound with INADDR_ANY. This allows a user to bind to the specific address of a server bound to INADDR_ANY on an unprivileged port, and steal its UDP packets/TCP connection.

What an attacker can do

  • Read Application Data (Confidentiality, Integrity)

How to prevent it

Policy

  • Restrict server socket address to known local addresses.

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-605 on MITRE's CWE site

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