CWE-671: Lack of Administrator Control over Security | Glexia
CWE-671 (Lack of Administrator Control over Security) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-671: Lack of Administrator Control over Security
Lack of Administrator Control over Security represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-671 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-671, 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-671: Lack of Administrator Control over Security
The product uses security features in a way that prevents the product's administrator from tailoring security settings to reflect the environment in which the product is being used. This introduces resultant weaknesses or prevents it from operating at a level of security that is desired by the administrator.
If the product's administrator does not have the ability to manage security-related decisions at all times, then protecting the product from outside threats - including the product's developer - can become impossible. For example, a hard-coded account name and password cannot be changed by the administrator, thus exposing that product to attacks that the administrator can not prevent.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code is an example of an internal hard-coded password in the back-end: Every instance of this program can be placed into diagnostic mode with the same password. Even worse is the fact that if this program is distributed as a binary-only distribution, it is very difficult to change that password or disable this "functionality."
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.