CWE-1428: Reliance on HTTP instead of HTTPS | Glexia
CWE-1428 (Reliance on HTTP instead of HTTPS) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1428: Reliance on HTTP instead of HTTPS
Reliance on HTTP instead of HTTPS represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality Integrity: Read Application Data Modify Application Data: HTTP can be subjected to attacks against confidentiality (by reading cleartext packets); integrity (by modifying sessions); and authenticity (by compromising servers and/or clients using cache poisoning, phishing, or other attacks that enable attackers to spoof a legitimate entity in the communication channel).
Developer Pattern
CWE-1428 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-1428, 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-1428: Reliance on HTTP instead of HTTPS
The product provides or relies on use of HTTP communications when HTTPS is available.
Because HTTP communications are not encrypted, HTTP is subject to various attacks against confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. However, unlike many other protocols, HTTPS is widely available as a more secure alternative, because it uses encryption.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Explicitly require HTTPS or another mechanism that ensures that communication is encrypted [REF-1464].
- Implementation: Avoid using "mixed content," i.e., serving a web page over HTTPS in which the page includes elements that use "http:" URLs [REF-1466] [REF-1467]. This is often done for images or other resources that do not seem to have privacy or security implications.
- Implementation Operation: Perform "HTTPS forcing," that is, redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS.
- Operation: If the product supports multiple protocols, ensure that encrypted protocols (such as HTTPS) are required, and remove any unencrypted protocols (such as HTTP).
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.