CWE-671: Lack of Administrator Control over Security
Official CWE-671 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-671: Lack of Administrator Control over Security
Lack of Administrator Control over Security represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context
Developer Pattern
CWE-671 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-671, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-671: Lack of Administrator Control over Security
The product uses security features in a way that prevents the product's administrator from tailoring security settings to reflect the environment in which the product is being used. This introduces resultant weaknesses or prevents it from operating at a level of security that is desired by the administrator.
If the product's administrator does not have the ability to manage security-related decisions at all times, then protecting the product from outside threats - including the product's developer - can become impossible. For example, a hard-coded account name and password cannot be changed by the administrator, thus exposing that product to attacks that the administrator can not prevent.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code is an example of an internal hard-coded password in the back-end: Every instance of this program can be placed into diagnostic mode with the same password. Even worse is the fact that if this program is distributed as a binary-only distribution, it is very difficult to change that password or disable this "functionality."
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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.