CWE-837: Improper Enforcement of a Single, Unique Action
Official CWE-837 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-837: Improper Enforcement of a Single, Unique Action
Improper Enforcement of a Single, Unique Action represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Varies by Context: An attacker might be able to gain advantage over other users by performing the action multiple times, or affect the correctness of the product.
Developer Pattern
CWE-837 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-837, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-837: Improper Enforcement of a Single, Unique Action
The product requires that an actor should only be able to perform an action once, or to have only one unique action, but the product does not enforce or improperly enforces this restriction.
In various applications, a user is only expected to perform a certain action once, such as voting, requesting a refund, or making a purchase. When this restriction is not enforced, sometimes this can have security implications. For example, in a voting application, an attacker could attempt to "stuff the ballot box" by voting multiple times. If these votes are counted separately, then the attacker could directly affect who wins the vote. This could have significant business impact depending on the purpose of the product.
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.