CWE-281: Improper Preservation of Permissions
Official CWE-281 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-281: Improper Preservation of Permissions
Improper Preservation of Permissions 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
Developer Pattern
CWE-281 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-281, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-281: Improper Preservation of Permissions
The product does not preserve permissions or incorrectly preserves permissions when copying, restoring, or sharing objects, which can cause them to have less restrictive permissions than intended.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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.