CWE-653: Improper Isolation or Compartmentalization
Official CWE-653 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-653: Separation of Privilege
Improper Isolation or Compartmentalization 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,Bypass Protection Mechanism: The exploitation of a weakness in low-privileged areas of the software can be leveraged to reach higher-privileged areas without having to overcome any additional obstacles.
Developer Pattern
CWE-653 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-653, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-653: Improper Isolation or Compartmentalization
The product does not properly compartmentalize or isolate functionality, processes, or resources that require different privilege levels, rights, or permissions.
When a weakness occurs in functionality that is accessible by lower-privileged users, then without strong boundaries, an attack might extend the scope of the damage to higher-privileged users.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Single sign-on technology is intended to make it easier for users to access multiple resources or domains without having to authenticate each time. While this is highly convenient for the user and attempts to address problems with psychological acceptability, it also means that a compromise of a user's credentials can provide immediate access to all other resources or domains.
- The traditional UNIX privilege model provides root with arbitrary access to all resources, but root is frequently the only user that has privileges. As a result, administrative tasks require root privileges, even if those tasks are limited to a small area, such as updating user manpages. Some UNIX flavors have a "bin" user that is the owner of system executables, but since root relies on executables owned by bin, a compromise of the bin account can be leveraged for root privileges by modifying a bin-owned executable, such as CVE-2007-4238.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Break up privileges between different modules, objects, or entities. Minimize the interfaces between modules and require strong access control between them.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode: [object Object]
- Manual Static Analysis - Source Code: [object Object]
- Architecture or Design Review: [object Object]
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.