CWE-842: Placement of User into Incorrect Group
Official CWE-842 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-842: Placement of User into Incorrect Group
Placement of User into Incorrect Group represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
Developer Pattern
CWE-842 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-842, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-842: Placement of User into Incorrect Group
The product or the administrator places a user into an incorrect group.
If the incorrect group has more access or privileges than the intended group, the user might be able to bypass intended security policy to access unexpected resources or perform unexpected actions. The access-control system might not be able to detect malicious usage of this group membership.
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.