CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure
Official CWE-693 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure
Protection Mechanism Failure 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
Developer Pattern
CWE-693 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-693, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure
The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the product.
This weakness covers three distinct situations. A "missing" protection mechanism occurs when the application does not define any mechanism against a certain class of attack. An "insufficient" protection mechanism might provide some defenses - for example, against the most common attacks - but it does not protect against everything that is intended. Finally, an "ignored" mechanism occurs when a mechanism is available and in active use within the product, but the developer has not applied it in some code path.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
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
- CWE-1039: Inadequate Detection or Handling of Adversarial Input Perturbations in Automated Recognition Mechanism
- CWE-1248: Semiconductor Defects in Hardware Logic with Security-Sensitive Implications
- CWE-1253: Incorrect Selection of Fuse Values
- CWE-1269: Product Released in Non-Release Configuration
- CWE-1278: Missing Protection Against Hardware Reverse Engineering Using Integrated Circuit (IC) Imaging Techniques
- CWE-1291: Public Key Re-Use for Signing both Debug and Production Code
- CWE-1318: Missing Support for Security Features in On-chip Fabrics or Buses
- CWE-1319: Improper Protection against Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EM-FI)
- CWE-1326: Missing Immutable Root of Trust in Hardware
- CWE-1338: Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating
- CWE-184: Incomplete List of Disallowed Inputs
- CWE-311: Missing Encryption of Sensitive Data
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.