CWE-304: Missing Critical Step in Authentication
Official CWE-304 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-304: Missing Critical Step in Authentication
Missing Critical Step in Authentication represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control,Integrity,Confidentiality: Bypass Protection Mechanism,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Read Application Data,Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands: This weakness can lead to the exposure of resources or functionality to unintended actors, possibly providing attackers with sensitive information or allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code.
Developer Pattern
CWE-304 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-304, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-304: Missing Critical Step in Authentication
The product implements an authentication technique, but it skips a step that weakens the technique.
Authentication techniques should follow the algorithms that define them exactly, otherwise authentication can be bypassed or more easily subjected to brute force attacks.
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
- 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.