CWE Reference

CWE-420: Unprotected Alternate Channel

Official CWE-420 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessDraft

Glexia's Take

CWE-420: Unprotected Alternate Channel

Unprotected Alternate Channel 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,Bypass Protection Mechanism

Developer Pattern

CWE-420 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-420, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-420: Unprotected Alternate Channel

The product protects a primary channel, but it does not use the same level of protection for an alternate channel.

Type: weakness
Abstraction: Base
Status: Draft
Source: MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

[object Object] The bugged line of code is repeated in the Bad example above. The weakness arises from the fact that the SECURE_ME register can be modified by writing to the shadow register COPY_OF_SECURE_ME. The address of COPY_OF_SECURE_ME should also be included in the check. That buggy line of code should instead be replaced as shown in the Good Code Snippet below.

Remediation

Architecture and Design: Identify all alternate channels and use the same protection mechanisms that are used for the primary channels.

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.

Open CWE CVE mapping

ATT&CK Relevance

ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.