CWE-299: Improper Check for Certificate Revocation
Official CWE-299 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-299: Improper Check for Certificate Revocation
Improper Check for Certificate Revocation 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: Trust may be assigned to an entity who is not who it claims to be.
- Integrity,Other: Other: Data from an untrusted (and possibly malicious) source may be integrated.
- Confidentiality: Read Application Data: Data may be disclosed to an entity impersonating a trusted entity, resulting in information disclosure.
Developer Pattern
CWE-299 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-299, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-299: Improper Check for Certificate Revocation
The product does not check or incorrectly checks the revocation status of a certificate, which may cause it to use a certificate that has been compromised.
An improper check for certificate revocation is a far more serious flaw than related certificate failures. This is because the use of any revoked certificate is almost certainly malicious. The most common reason for certificate revocation is compromise of the system in question, with the result that no legitimate servers will be using a revoked certificate, unless they are sorely out of sync.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following OpenSSL code ensures that there is a certificate before continuing execution. Because this code does not use SSL_get_verify_results() to check the certificate, it could accept certificates that have been revoked (X509_V_ERR_CERT_REVOKED). The product could be communicating with a malicious host.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Ensure that certificates are checked for revoked status.
- 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 revoked status.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.