CWE-441: Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused… | Glexia
CWE-441 (Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy')) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-441: Confused Deputy
Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy') represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Non-Repudiation,Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Hide Activities,Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
Developer Pattern
CWE-441 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-441, 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-441: Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy')
The product receives a request, message, or directive from an upstream component, but the product does not sufficiently preserve the original source of the request before forwarding the request to an external actor that is outside of the product's control sphere. This causes the product to appear to be the source of the request, leading it to act as a proxy or other intermediary between the upstream component and the external actor.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- A SoC contains a microcontroller (running ring-3 (least trusted ring) code), a Memory Mapped Input Output (MMIO) mapped IP core (containing design-house secrets), and a Direct Memory Access (DMA) controller, among several other compute elements and peripherals. The SoC implements access control to protect the registers in the IP core (which registers store the design-house secrets) from malicious, ring-3 (least trusted ring) code executing on the microcontroller. The DMA controller, however, is not blocked off from accessing the IP core for functional reasons. The weakness here is that the intermediary or the proxy agent did not ensure the immutability of the identity of the microcontroller initiating the transaction.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Enforce the use of strong mutual authentication mechanism between the two parties.
- Architecture and Design: Whenever a product is an intermediary or proxy for transactions between two other components, the proxy core should not drop the identity of the initiator of the transaction. The immutability of the identity of the initiator must be maintained and should be forwarded all the way to the target.
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.