CWE-799: Improper Control of Interaction Frequency
Official CWE-799 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-799: Insufficient anti-automation
Improper Control of Interaction Frequency represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability,Access Control,Other: DoS: Resource Consumption (Other),Bypass Protection Mechanism,Other
Developer Pattern
CWE-799 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-799, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-799: Improper Control of Interaction Frequency
The product does not properly limit the number or frequency of interactions that it has with an actor, such as the number of incoming requests.
This can allow the actor to perform actions more frequently than expected. The actor could be a human or an automated process such as a virus or bot. This could be used to cause a denial of service, compromise program logic (such as limiting humans to a single vote), or other consequences. For example, an authentication routine might not limit the number of times an attacker can guess a password. Or, a web site might conduct a poll but only expect humans to vote a maximum of once a day.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following code a username and password is read from a socket and an attempt is made to authenticate the username and password. The code will continuously checked the socket for a username and password until it has been authenticated. This code does not place any restriction on the number of authentication attempts made. There should be a limit on the number of authentication attempts made to prevent brute force attacks as in the following example code.
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.