CWE-446: UI Discrepancy for Security Feature
Official CWE-446 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-446: UI Discrepancy for Security Feature
UI Discrepancy for Security Feature represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-446 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-446, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-446: UI Discrepancy for Security Feature
The user interface does not correctly enable or configure a security feature, but the interface provides feedback that causes the user to believe that the feature is in a secure state.
When the user interface does not properly reflect what the user asks of it, then it can lead the user into a false sense of security. For example, the user might check a box to enable a security option to enable encrypted communications, but the product does not actually enable the encryption. Alternately, the user might provide a "restrict ALL" access control rule, but the product only implements "restrict SOME".
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
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.