Weakness · High

CWE-654: Reliance on a Single Factor in a Security Decision

What it is

A protection mechanism relies exclusively, or to a large extent, on the evaluation of a single condition or the integrity of a single object or entity in order to make a decision about granting access to restricted resources or functionality.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

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

What an attacker can do

  • Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)
  • Hide Activities (Non-Repudiation)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

  • Use multiple simultaneous checks before granting access to critical operations or granting critical privileges. A weaker but helpful mitigation is to use several successive checks (multiple layers of security).
  • Use redundant access rules on different choke points (e.g., firewalls).

CWE-654 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.