CWE-1395: Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component | Glexia
CWE-1395 (Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1395: Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component
Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Integrity,Availability: Varies by Context: The consequences vary widely, depending on the vulnerabilities that exist in the component; how those vulnerabilities can be "reached" by adversaries, as the exploitation paths and attack surface will vary depending on how the component is used; and the criticality of the privilege levels and features for which the product relies on the component.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1395 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-1395, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1395: Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component
The product has a dependency on a third-party component that contains one or more known vulnerabilities.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The "SweynTooth" vulnerabilities in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) software development kits (SDK) were found to affect multiple Bluetooth System-on-Chip (SoC) manufacturers. These SoCs were used by many products such as medical devices, Smart Home devices, wearables, and other IoT devices. [REF-1314] [REF-1315]
- log4j, a Java-based logging framework, is used in a large number of products, with estimates in the range of 3 billion affected devices [REF-1317]. When the "log4shell" (CVE-2021-44228) vulnerability was initially announced, it was actively exploited for remote code execution, requiring urgent mitigation in many organizations. However, it was unclear how many products were affected, as Log4j would sometimes be part of a long sequence of transitive dependencies. [REF-1316]
Remediation
- Requirements,Policy: In some industries such as healthcare [REF-1320] [REF-1322] or technologies such as the cloud [REF-1321], it might be unclear about who is responsible for applying patches for third-party vulnerabilities: the vendor, the operator/customer, or a separate service. Clarifying roles and responsibilities can be important to minimize confusion or unnecessary delay when third-party vulnerabilities are disclosed.
- Requirements: Require a Bill of Materials for all components and sub-components of the product. For software, require a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) [REF-1247] [REF-1311].
- Architecture and Design,Implementation,Integration,Manufacturing: Maintain a Bill of Materials for all components and sub-components of the product. For software, maintain a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). According to [REF-1247], "An SBOM is a formal, machine-readable inventory of software components and dependencies, information about those components, and their hierarchical relationships."
- Operation,Patching and Maintenance: Actively monitor when a third-party component vendor announces vulnerability patches; fix the third-party component as soon as possible; and make it easy for operators/customers to obtain and apply the patch.
- Operation,Patching and Maintenance: Continuously monitor changes in each of the product's components, especially when the changes indicate new vulnerabilities, end-of-life (EOL) plans, etc.
Detection
- Automated Analysis: For software, use Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools, which automatically analyze products to identify third-party dependencies. Often, SCA tools can be used to link with known vulnerabilities in the dependencies that they detect. There are commercial and open-source alternatives, such as OWASP Dependency-Check [REF-1312]. Many languages or frameworks have package managers with similar capabilities, such as npm audit for JavaScript, pip-audit for Python, govulncheck for Go, and many others. Dynamic methods can detect loading of third-party components.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.