CWE-780: Use of RSA Algorithm without OAEP | Glexia
CWE-780 (Use of RSA Algorithm without OAEP) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-780: Use of RSA Algorithm without OAEP
Use of RSA Algorithm without OAEP 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: Without OAEP in RSA encryption, it will take less work for an attacker to decrypt the data or to infer patterns from the ciphertext.
Developer Pattern
CWE-780 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-780, 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-780: Use of RSA Algorithm without OAEP
The product uses the RSA algorithm but does not incorporate Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP), which might weaken the encryption.
Padding schemes are often used with cryptographic algorithms to make the plaintext less predictable and complicate attack efforts. The OAEP scheme is often used with RSA to nullify the impact of predictable common text.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The example below attempts to build an RSA cipher. While the previous code successfully creates an RSA cipher, the cipher does not use padding. The following code creates an RSA cipher using OAEP.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.