CWE-1061: Insufficient Encapsulation
Official CWE-1061 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-1061: Insufficient Encapsulation
Insufficient Encapsulation represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Varies by Context,Bypass Protection Mechanism: An attacker can access data or methods that were not intended to be accessible.
- Other: Reduce Maintainability,Increase Analytical Complexity: This issue makes it more difficult to maintain the product, which indirectly affects security by making it more difficult or time-consuming to find and/or fix vulnerabilities. It also might make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1061 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-1061, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-1061: Insufficient Encapsulation
The product does not sufficiently hide the internal representation and implementation details of data or methods, which might allow external components or modules to modify data unexpectedly, invoke unexpected functionality, or introduce dependencies that the programmer did not intend.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example shows a basic user account class that includes member variables for the username and password as well as a public constructor for the class and a public method to authorize access to the user account. However, the member variables username and password are declared public and therefore will allow access and changes to the member variables to anyone with access to the object. These member variables should be declared private as shown below to prevent unauthorized access and changes.
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-1054: Invocation of a Control Element at an Unnecessarily Deep Horizontal Layer
- CWE-1057: Data Access Operations Outside of Expected Data Manager Component
- CWE-710: Improper Adherence to Coding Standards
- CWE-1062: Parent Class with References to Child Class
- CWE-1083: Data Access from Outside Expected Data Manager Component
- CWE-1090: Method Containing Access of a Member Element from Another Class
- CWE-1100: Insufficient Isolation of System-Dependent Functions
- CWE-1105: Insufficient Encapsulation of Machine-Dependent Functionality
- CWE-766: Critical Data Element Declared Public
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.