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CWE Reference

CWE-863: Incorrect Authorization

Official CWE-863 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessIncomplete
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Glexia's Take

CWE-863: AuthZ

Incorrect Authorization represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Confidentiality: Read Application Data,Read Files or Directories: An attacker could bypass intended access restrictions to read sensitive data, either by reading the data directly from a data store that is not correctly restricted, or by accessing insufficiently-protected, privileged functionality to read the data.
  • Integrity: Modify Application Data,Modify Files or Directories: An attacker could bypass intended access restrictions to modify sensitive data, either by writing the data directly to a data store that is not correctly restricted, or by accessing insufficiently-protected, privileged functionality to write the data.
  • Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Bypass Protection Mechanism: An attacker could bypass intended access restrictions to gain privileges by modifying or reading critical data directly, or by accessing privileged functionality.
  • Confidentiality,Integrity,Availability: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands: An attacker could use elevated privileges to execute unauthorized commands or code.
  • Availability: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart,DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU),DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory),DoS: Resource Consumption (Other): An attacker could gain unauthorized access to resources on the system and excessively consume those resources, leading to a denial of service.

Developer Pattern

CWE-863 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-863, 4.20.

Official CWE Definition

CWE-863: Incorrect Authorization

The product performs an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action, but it does not correctly perform the check.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Class
Status
Incomplete
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • The following code could be for a medical records application. It displays a record to already authenticated users, confirming the user's authorization using a value stored in a cookie. The programmer expects that the cookie will only be set when getRole() succeeds. The programmer even diligently specifies a 2-hour expiration for the cookie. However, the attacker can easily set the "role" cookie to the value "Reader". As a result, the $role variable is "Reader", and getRole() is never invoked. The attacker has bypassed the authorization system.

Remediation

  • Architecture and Design: [object Object]
  • Architecture and Design: Ensure that access control checks are performed related to the business logic. These checks may be different than the access control checks that are applied to more generic resources such as files, connections, processes, memory, and database records. For example, a database may restrict access for medical records to a specific database user, but each record might only be intended to be accessible to the patient and the patient's doctor [REF-7].
  • System Configuration,Installation: Use the access control capabilities of your operating system and server environment and define your access control lists accordingly. Use a "default deny" policy when defining these ACLs.

Detection

  • Automated Static Analysis: [object Object]
  • Automated Dynamic Analysis: Automated dynamic analysis may not be able to find interfaces that are protected by authorization checks, even if those checks contain weaknesses.
  • Manual Analysis: [object Object]
  • Manual Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode: [object Object]
  • Dynamic Analysis with Automated Results Interpretation: [object Object]
  • Dynamic Analysis with Manual Results Interpretation: [object Object]
  • Manual Static Analysis - Source Code: [object Object]
  • Automated Static Analysis - Source Code: [object Object]

Mappings

Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context

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ATT&CK Relevance

ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.