CWE-650: Trusting HTTP Permission Methods on the Server Side
Official CWE-650 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-650: Trusting HTTP Permission Methods on the Server Side
Trusting HTTP Permission Methods on the Server Side 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 escalate privileges.
- Integrity: Modify Application Data: An attacker could modify resources.
- Confidentiality: Read Application Data: An attacker could obtain sensitive information.
Developer Pattern
CWE-650 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-650, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-650: Trusting HTTP Permission Methods on the Server Side
The server contains a protection mechanism that assumes that any URI that is accessed using HTTP GET will not cause a state change to the associated resource. This might allow attackers to bypass intended access restrictions and conduct resource modification and deletion attacks, since some applications allow GET to modify state.
The HTTP GET method and some other methods are designed to retrieve resources and not to alter the state of the application or resources on the server side. Furthermore, the HTTP specification requires that GET requests (and other requests) should not have side effects. Believing that it will be enough to prevent unintended resource alterations, an application may disallow the HTTP requests to perform DELETE, PUT and POST operations on the resource representation. However, there is nothing in the HTTP protocol itself that actually prevents the HTTP GET method from performing more than just query of the data. Developers can easily code programs that accept a HTTP GET request that do in fact create, update or delete data on the server. For instance, it is a common practice with REST based Web Services to have HTTP GET requests modifying resources on the server side. However, whenever that happens, the access control needs to be properly enforced in the application. No assumptions should be made that only HTTP DELETE, PUT, POST, and other methods have the power to alter the representation of the resource being accessed in the request.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- System Configuration: Configure ACLs on the server side to ensure that proper level of access control is defined for each accessible resource representation.
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.