CWE-435: Improper Interaction Between Multiple Correctly-Behaving Entities
Official CWE-435 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-435: Interaction Error
Improper Interaction Between Multiple Correctly-Behaving Entities represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Unexpected State,Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-435 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-435, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-435: Improper Interaction Between Multiple Correctly-Behaving Entities
An interaction error occurs when two entities have correct behavior when running independently of each other, but when they are integrated as components in a larger system or process, they introduce incorrect behaviors that may cause resultant weaknesses.
When a system or process combines multiple independent components, this often produces new, emergent behaviors at the system level. However, if the interactions between these components are not fully accounted for, some of the emergent behaviors can be incorrect or even insecure.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The paper "Insertion, Evasion, and Denial of Service: Eluding Network Intrusion Detection" [REF-428] shows that OSes varied widely in how they manage unusual packets, which made it difficult or impossible for intrusion detection systems to properly detect certain attacker manipulations that took advantage of these OS differences.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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.