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CWE Reference

CWE-298: Improper Validation of Certificate Expiration

Official CWE-298 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessDraft
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Glexia's Take

CWE-298: Improper Validation of Certificate Expiration

Improper Validation of Certificate Expiration represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Integrity,Other: Other: The data read from the system vouched for by the expired certificate may be flawed due to malicious spoofing.
  • Authentication,Other: Other: Trust may be assigned to certificates that have been abandoned due to age.

Developer Pattern

CWE-298 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-298, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-298: Improper Validation of Certificate Expiration

A certificate expiration is not validated or is incorrectly validated.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Variant
Status
Draft
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • The following OpenSSL code ensures that there is a certificate and allows the use of expired certificates. If the call to SSL_get_verify_result() returns X509_V_ERR_CERT_HAS_EXPIRED, this means that the certificate has expired. As time goes on, there is an increasing chance for attackers to compromise the certificate.

Remediation

  • Architecture and Design: Check for expired certificates and provide the user with adequate information about the nature of the problem and how to proceed.
  • Implementation: If certificate pinning is being used, ensure that all relevant properties of the certificate are fully validated before the certificate is pinned, including the expiration.

Detection

  • Code review
  • SAST
  • DAST
  • Focused regression tests

Mappings

Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context

Related CWEs

Related CVEs

Related CVE mappings appear after CVE records are cross-indexed.

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ATT&CK Relevance

ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.