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CWE Reference

CWE-1021: Improper Restriction of Rendered UI Layers or Frames

Official CWE-1021 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessIncomplete

Glexia's Take

CWE-1021: Clickjacking

Improper Restriction of Rendered UI Layers or Frames represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Bypass Protection Mechanism,Read Application Data,Modify Application Data: An attacker can trick a user into performing actions that are masked and hidden from the user's view. The impact varies widely, depending on the functionality of the underlying application. For example, in a social media application, clickjacking could be used to trick the user into changing privacy settings.

Developer Pattern

CWE-1021 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.

Confidence

high confidence from CWE-1021, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-1021: Improper Restriction of Rendered UI Layers or Frames

The web application does not restrict or incorrectly restricts frame objects or UI layers that belong to another application or domain.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Base
Status
Incomplete
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • Missing validation
  • Unsafe defaults
  • Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant

Remediation

  • Implementation: [object Object]
  • Implementation: This defense-in-depth technique can be used to prevent the improper usage of frames in web applications. It prioritizes the valid sources of data to be loaded into the application through the usage of declarative policies. Based on which implementation of Content Security Policy is in use, the developer should use the "frame-ancestors" directive or the "frame-src" directive to mitigate this weakness. Both directives allow for the placement of restrictions when it comes to allowing embedded content.
  • Implementation: In addition to frames or iframes as previously mentioned, the web application is expected to place restrictions on whether it is allowed to be rendered within objects, embed, or applet elements.

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

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ATT&CK Relevance

ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.