CWE-923: Improper Restriction of Communication Channel to… | Glexia
CWE-923 (Improper Restriction of Communication Channel to Intended Endpoints) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-923: Improper Restriction of Communication Channel to Intended Endpoints
Improper Restriction of Communication Channel to Intended Endpoints represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Confidentiality: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: If an attacker can spoof the endpoint, the attacker gains all the privileges that were intended for the original endpoint.
Developer Pattern
CWE-923 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-923, 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-923: Improper Restriction of Communication Channel to Intended Endpoints
The product establishes a communication channel to (or from) an endpoint for privileged or protected operations, but it does not properly ensure that it is communicating with the correct endpoint.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- These cross-domain policy files mean to allow Flash and Silverlight applications hosted on other domains to access its data: Flash crossdomain.xml :,Silverlight clientaccesspolicy.xml :,These entries are far too permissive, allowing any Flash or Silverlight application to send requests. A malicious application hosted on any other web site will be able to send requests on behalf of any user tricked into executing it.
- This Android application will remove a user account when it receives an intent to do so: This application does not check the origin of the intent, thus allowing any malicious application to remove a user. Always check the origin of an intent, or create an allowlist of trusted applications using the manifest.xml file.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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
- CWE-1275: Sensitive Cookie with Improper SameSite Attribute
- CWE-291: Reliance on IP Address for Authentication
- CWE-297: Improper Validation of Certificate with Host Mismatch
- CWE-300: Channel Accessible by Non-Endpoint
- CWE-322: Key Exchange without Entity Authentication
- CWE-350: Reliance on Reverse DNS Resolution for a Security-Critical Action
- CWE-419: Unprotected Primary Channel
- CWE-420: Unprotected Alternate Channel
- CWE-284: Improper Access Control
- CWE-940: Improper Verification of Source of a Communication Channel
- CWE-941: Incorrectly Specified Destination in a Communication Channel
- CWE-942: Permissive Cross-domain Security Policy with Untrusted Domains
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.