CWE-308: Use of Single-factor Authentication | Glexia
CWE-308 (Use of Single-factor Authentication) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-308: Use of Single-factor Authentication
Use of Single-factor Authentication represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism: If the secret in a single-factor authentication scheme gets compromised, full authentication is possible.
Developer Pattern
CWE-308 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-308, 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-308: Use of Single-factor Authentication
The product uses an authentication algorithm that uses a single factor (e.g., a password) in a security context that should require more than one factor.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In both of these examples, a user is logged in if their given password matches a stored password: This code relies exclusively on a password mechanism (CWE-309) using only one factor of authentication (CWE-308). If an attacker can steal or guess a user's password, they are given full access to their account. Note this code also uses SHA-1, which is a weak hash (CWE-328). It also does not use a salt (CWE-759).
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use multiple independent authentication schemes, which ensures that -- if one of the methods is compromised -- the system itself is still likely safe from compromise. For this reason, if multiple schemes are possible, they should be implemented and required -- especially if they are easy to use.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
No related CWE relationships are published yet.
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.