CWE-656: Reliance on Security Through Obscurity | Glexia
CWE-656 (Reliance on Security Through Obscurity) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-656: Never Assuming your secrets are safe
Reliance on Security Through Obscurity represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality Integrity Availability Other: Other: The security mechanism can be bypassed easily.
Developer Pattern
CWE-656 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-656, 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-656: Reliance on Security Through Obscurity
The product uses a protection mechanism whose strength depends heavily on its obscurity, such that knowledge of its algorithms or key data is sufficient to defeat the mechanism.
This reliance on "security through obscurity" can produce resultant weaknesses if an attacker is able to reverse engineer the inner workings of the mechanism. Note that obscurity can be one small part of defense in depth, since it can create more work for an attacker; however, it is a significant risk if used as the primary means of protection.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The design of TCP relies on the secrecy of Initial Sequence Numbers (ISNs), as originally covered in CVE-1999-0077 [REF-542]. If ISNs can be guessed (due to predictability, CWE-330) or sniffed (due to lack of encryption during transmission, CWE-312), then an attacker can hijack or spoof connections. Many TCP implementations have had variations of this problem over the years, including CVE-2004-0641, CVE-2002-1463, CVE-2001-0751, CVE-2001-0328, CVE-2001-0288, CVE-2001-0163, CVE-2001-0162, CVE-2000-0916, and CVE-2000-0328.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Always consider whether knowledge of your code or design is sufficient to break it. Reverse engineering is a highly successful discipline, and financially feasible for motivated adversaries. Black-box techniques are established for binary analysis of executables that use obfuscation, runtime analysis of proprietary protocols, inferring file formats, and others.
- Architecture and Design: When available, use publicly-vetted algorithms and procedures, as these are more likely to undergo more extensive security analysis and testing. This is especially the case with encryption and authentication.
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.