CWE-360: Trust of System Event Data
Official CWE-360 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-360: Trust of System Event Data
Trust of System Event Data represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Confidentiality,Availability,Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands: If one trusts the system-event information and executes commands based on it, one could potentially take actions based on a spoofed identity.
Developer Pattern
CWE-360 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-360, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-360: Trust of System Event Data
Security based on event locations are insecure and can be spoofed.
Events are a messaging system which may provide control data to programs listening for events. Events often do not have any type of authentication framework to allow them to be verified from a trusted source. Any application, in Windows, on a given desktop can send a message to any window on the same desktop. There is no authentication framework for these messages. Therefore, any message can be used to manipulate any process on the desktop if the process does not check the validity and safeness of those messages.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This example code prints out secret information when an authorized user activates a button: This code does not attempt to prevent unauthorized users from activating the button. Even if the button is rendered non-functional to unauthorized users in the application UI, an attacker can easily send a false button press event to the application window and expose the secret information.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Never trust or rely any of the information in an Event for security.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.