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CWE Reference

CWE-308: Use of Single-factor Authentication

Official CWE-308 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessDraft
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Glexia's Take

CWE-308: Use of Single-factor Authentication

Use of Single-factor Authentication represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism: If the secret in a single-factor authentication scheme gets compromised, full authentication is possible.

Developer Pattern

CWE-308 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-308, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-308: Use of Single-factor Authentication

The product uses an authentication algorithm that uses a single factor (e.g., a password) in a security context that should require more than one factor.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Base
Status
Draft
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • In both of these examples, a user is logged in if their given password matches a stored password: This code relies exclusively on a password mechanism (CWE-309) using only one factor of authentication (CWE-308). If an attacker can steal or guess a user's password, they are given full access to their account. Note this code also uses SHA-1, which is a weak hash (CWE-328). It also does not use a salt (CWE-759).

Remediation

  • Architecture and Design: Use multiple independent authentication schemes, which ensures that -- if one of the methods is compromised -- the system itself is still likely safe from compromise. For this reason, if multiple schemes are possible, they should be implemented and required -- especially if they are easy to use.

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.