CWE-655: Insufficient Psychological Acceptability
Official CWE-655 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-655: Insufficient Psychological Acceptability
Insufficient Psychological Acceptability represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism: By bypassing the security mechanism, a user might leave the system in a less secure state than intended by the administrator, making it more susceptible to compromise.
Developer Pattern
CWE-655 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-655, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-655: Insufficient Psychological Acceptability
The product has a protection mechanism that is too difficult or inconvenient to use, encouraging non-malicious users to disable or bypass the mechanism, whether by accident or on purpose.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In "Usability of Security: A Case Study" [REF-540], the authors consider human factors in a cryptography product. Some of the weakness relevant discoveries of this case study were: users accidentally leaked sensitive information, could not figure out how to perform some tasks, thought they were enabling a security option when they were not, and made improper trust decisions.
- Enforcing complex and difficult-to-remember passwords that need to be frequently changed for access to trivial resources, e.g., to use a black-and-white printer. Complex password requirements can also cause users to store the passwords in an unsafe manner so they don't have to remember them, such as using a sticky note or saving them in an unencrypted file.
- Some CAPTCHA utilities produce images that are too difficult for a human to read, causing user frustration.
Remediation
- Testing: Where possible, perform human factors and usability studies to identify where your product's security mechanisms are difficult to use, and why.
- Architecture and Design: Make the security mechanism as seamless as possible, while also providing the user with sufficient details when a security decision produces unexpected results.
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.