CWE-321: Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key | Glexia
CWE-321 (Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-321: Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key
Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key 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,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Read Application Data: If hard-coded cryptographic keys are used, it is almost certain that malicious users will gain access through the account in question. The use of a hard-coded cryptographic key significantly increases the possibility that encrypted data may be recovered.
Developer Pattern
CWE-321 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-321, 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-321: Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key
The product uses a hard-coded, unchangeable cryptographic key.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code examples attempt to verify a password using a hard-coded cryptographic key. The cryptographic key is within a hard-coded string value that is compared to the password. It is likely that an attacker will be able to read the key and compromise the system.
- In 2022, the OT:ICEFALL study examined products by 10 different Operational Technology (OT) vendors. The researchers reported 56 vulnerabilities and said that the products were "insecure by design" [REF-1283]. If exploited, these vulnerabilities often allowed adversaries to change how the products operated, ranging from denial of service to changing the code that the products executed. Since these products were often used in industries such as power, electrical, water, and others, there could even be safety implications. Multiple vendors used hard-coded keys for critical functionality in their OT products.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Prevention schemes mirror that of hard-coded password storage.
Detection
- 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.)
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.