CWE-263: Password Aging with Long Expiration | Glexia
CWE-263 (Password Aging with Long Expiration) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-263: Password Aging with Long Expiration
Password Aging with Long Expiration 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: As passwords age, the probability that they are compromised grows.
Developer Pattern
CWE-263 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-263, 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-263: Password Aging with Long Expiration
The product supports password aging, but the expiration period is too long.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- A system requires the changing of passwords every five years.
Remediation
- Implementation: Previously, "password expiration" was widely advocated as a defense-in-depth approach to minimize the risk of weak passwords, and it has become a common practice. Password expiration requires a password to be changed within a fixed time window (such as every 90 days). However, this approach has significant limitations in the current threat landscape, and its utility has been reduced in light of the adoption of related protection mechanisms (such as password complexity and computational effort), along with the recognition that regular password changes often caused users to generate more predictable passwords. As a result, this is now a Discouraged Common Practice [REF-1488] [REF-1489], especially as the sole factor in protecting passwords. It is still strongly encouraged to force password changes in case of evidence of compromise, but this is not the same as a forced "expiration" on an arbitrary time frame.
- Architecture and Design: Ensure that password aging is limited so that there is a defined maximum age for passwords. Note that if the expiration window is too short, it can cause users to generate poor or predictable passwords.
- Architecture and Design: Ensure that the user is notified several times leading up to the password expiration.
- Architecture and Design: Create mechanisms to prevent users from reusing passwords or creating similar passwords.
- Implementation: Developers might disable clipboard paste operations into password fields as a way to discourage users from pasting a password into a clipboard. However, this might encourage users to choose less-secure passwords that are easier to type, and it can reduce the usability of password managers [REF-1294].
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.