CWE-386: Symbolic Name not Mapping to Correct Object

Executive Impact

• Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: The attacker can gain access to otherwise unauthorized resources.
• Integrity,Confidentiality,Other: Modify Application Data,Modify Files or Directories,Read Application Data,Read Files or Directories,Other: Race conditions such as this kind may be employed to gain read or write access to resources not normally readable or writable by the user in question.
• Integrity,Other: Modify Application Data,Other: The resource in question, or other resources (through the corrupted one) may be changed in undesirable ways by a malicious user.
• Non-Repudiation: Hide Activities: If a file or other resource is written in this method, as opposed to a valid way, logging of the activity may not occur.
• Non-Repudiation,Integrity: Modify Files or Directories: In some cases it may be possible to delete files that a malicious user might not otherwise have access to -- such as log files.

Developer Pattern

CWE-386 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-386, 4.20.