CWE-523: Unprotected Transport of Credentials
Official CWE-523 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-523: Unprotected Transport of Credentials
Unprotected Transport of Credentials 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
Developer Pattern
CWE-523 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-523, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-523: Unprotected Transport of Credentials
Login pages do not use adequate measures to protect the user name and password while they are in transit from the client to the server.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Operation,System Configuration: Enforce SSL use for the login page or any page used to transmit user credentials or other sensitive information. Even if the entire site does not use SSL, it MUST use SSL for login. Additionally, to help prevent phishing attacks, make sure that SSL serves the login page. SSL allows the user to verify the identity of the server to which they are connecting. If the SSL serves login page, the user can be certain they are talking to the proper end system. A phishing attack would typically redirect a user to a site that does not have a valid trusted server certificate issued from an authorized supplier.
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.