CWE-649: Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of… | Glexia
CWE-649 (Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods,…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-649: Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking
Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Unexpected State: The inputs could be modified without detection, causing the product to have unexpected system state or make incorrect security decisions.
Developer Pattern
CWE-649 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.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-649, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-649: Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking
The product uses obfuscation or encryption of inputs that should not be mutable by an external actor, but the product does not use integrity checks to detect if those inputs have been modified.
When an application relies on obfuscation or incorrectly applied / weak encryption to protect client-controllable tokens or parameters, that may have an effect on the user state, system state, or some decision made on the server. Without protecting the tokens/parameters for integrity, the application is vulnerable to an attack where an adversary traverses the space of possible values of the said token/parameter in order to attempt to gain an advantage. The goal of the attacker is to find another admissible value that will somehow elevate their privileges in the system, disclose information or change the behavior of the system in some way beneficial to the attacker. If the application does not protect these critical tokens/parameters for integrity, it will not be able to determine that these values have been tampered with. Measures that are used to protect data for confidentiality should not be relied upon to provide the integrity service.
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: Protect important client controllable tokens/parameters for integrity using PKI methods (i.e. digital signatures) or other means, and checks for integrity on the server side.
- Architecture and Design: Repeated requests from a particular user that include invalid values of tokens/parameters (those that should not be changed manually by users) should result in the user account lockout.
- Architecture and Design: Client side tokens/parameters should not be such that it would be easy/predictable to guess another valid state.
- Architecture and Design: Obfuscation should not be relied upon. If encryption is used, it needs to be properly applied (i.e. proven algorithm and implementation, use padding, use random initialization vector, user proper encryption mode). Even with proper encryption where the ciphertext does not leak information about the plaintext or reveal its structure, compromising integrity is possible (although less likely) without the provision of the integrity service.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.