CWE-618: Exposed Unsafe ActiveX Method
Official CWE-618 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-618: Exposed Unsafe ActiveX Method
Exposed Unsafe ActiveX Method represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Other
Developer Pattern
CWE-618 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-618, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-618: Exposed Unsafe ActiveX Method
An ActiveX control is intended for use in a web browser, but it exposes dangerous methods that perform actions that are outside of the browser's security model (e.g. the zone or domain).
ActiveX controls can exercise far greater control over the operating system than typical Java or javascript. Exposed methods can be subject to various vulnerabilities, depending on the implemented behaviors of those methods, and whether input validation is performed on the provided arguments. If there is no integrity checking or origin validation, this method could be invoked by attackers.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Implementation: If you must expose a method, make sure to perform input validation on all arguments, and protect against all possible vulnerabilities.
- Architecture and Design: Use code signing, although this does not protect against any weaknesses that are already in the control.
- Architecture and Design,System Configuration: Where possible, avoid marking the control as safe for scripting.
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.