CWE-294: Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay | Glexia
CWE-294 (Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-294: Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay
Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay 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: Messages sent with a capture-relay attack allow access to resources which are not otherwise accessible without proper authentication.
Developer Pattern
CWE-294 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-294, 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-294: Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay
A capture-replay flaw exists when the design of the product makes it possible for a malicious user to sniff network traffic and bypass authentication by replaying it to the server in question to the same effect as the original message (or with minor changes).
Capture-replay attacks are common and can be difficult to defeat without cryptography. They are a subset of network injection attacks that rely on observing previously-sent valid commands, then changing them slightly if necessary and resending the same commands to the server.
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: Utilize some sequence or time stamping functionality along with a checksum which takes this into account in order to ensure that messages can be parsed only once.
- Architecture and Design: Since any attacker who can listen to traffic can see sequence numbers, it is necessary to sign messages with some kind of cryptography to ensure that sequence numbers are not simply doctored along with content.
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.