CWE Reference
CWE-521: Weak Password Requirements
Official CWE-521 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Release 4.20weaknessDraft
Glexia's Take
CWE-521: Weak Password Requirements
Weak Password Requirements 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: An attacker could easily guess user passwords and gain access user accounts.
Developer Pattern
CWE-521 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-521, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-521: Weak Password Requirements
The product does not require that users should have strong passwords.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: [object Object]
- Architecture and Design: Consider a second authentication factor beyond the password, which prevents the password from being a single point of failure. See CWE-308 for further information.
- Implementation: Consider implementing a password complexity meter to inform users when a chosen password meets the required attributes.
- Implementation: Previously, "password expiration" was widely advocated as a defense-in-depth approach to minimize the risk of weak passwords, and it has become a common practice. Password expiration requires a password to be changed within a fixed time window (such as every 90 days). However, this approach has significant limitations in the current threat landscape, and its utility has been reduced in light of the adoption of related protection mechanisms (such as password complexity and computational effort), along with the recognition that regular password changes often caused users to generate more predictable passwords. As a result, this is now a Discouraged Common Practice [REF-1488] [REF-1489], especially as the sole factor in protecting passwords. It is still strongly encouraged to force password changes in case of evidence of compromise, but this is not the same as a forced "expiration" on an arbitrary time frame.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.