CWE-841: Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow | Glexia
CWE-841 (Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-841: Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow
Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Alter Execution Logic: An attacker could cause the product to skip critical steps or perform them in the wrong order, bypassing its intended business logic. This can sometimes have security implications.
Developer Pattern
CWE-841 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-841, 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-841: Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow
The product supports a session in which more than one behavior must be performed by an actor, but it does not properly ensure that the actor performs the behaviors in the required sequence.
By performing actions in an unexpected order, or by omitting steps, an attacker could manipulate the business logic of the product or cause it to enter an invalid state. In some cases, this can also expose resultant weaknesses. For example, a file-sharing protocol might require that an actor perform separate steps to provide a username, then a password, before being able to transfer files. If the file-sharing server accepts a password command followed by a transfer command, without any username being provided, the product might still perform the transfer. Note that this is different than CWE-696, which focuses on when the product performs actions in the wrong sequence; this entry is closely related, but it is focused on ensuring that the actor performs actions in the correct sequence. Workflow-related behaviors include: Steps are performed in the expected order. Required steps are not omitted. Steps are not interrupted. Steps are performed in a timely fashion.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This code is part of an FTP server and deals with various commands that could be sent by a user. It is intended that a user must successfully login before performing any other action such as retrieving or listing files. The server correctly avoids sending files to a user that isn't logged in and doesn't own the file. However, the server will incorrectly list the files in any directory without confirming the command came from an authenticated user, and that the user is authorized to see the directory's contents. Here is a fixed version of the above example:
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
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.