CWE-916: Use of Password Hash With Insufficient… | Glexia
CWE-916 (Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-916: Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort
Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: If an attacker can gain access to the hashes, then the lack of sufficient computational effort will make it easier to conduct brute force attacks using techniques such as rainbow tables, or specialized hardware such as GPUs, which can be much faster than general-purpose CPUs for computing hashes.
Developer Pattern
CWE-916 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-916, 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-916: Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort
The product generates a hash for a password, but it uses a scheme that does not provide a sufficient level of computational effort that would make password cracking attacks infeasible or expensive.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In this example, a new user provides a new username and password to create an account. The program hashes the new user's password then stores it in a database. While it is good to avoid storing a cleartext password, the program does not provide a salt to the hashing function, thus increasing the chances of an attacker being able to reverse the hash and discover the original password if the database is compromised.,Fixing this is as simple as providing a salt to the hashing function on initialization:,Note that regardless of the usage of a salt, the md5 hash is no longer considered secure, so this example still exhibits CWE-327.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design:
- Implementation,Architecture and Design: When using industry-approved techniques, use them correctly. Don't cut corners by skipping resource-intensive steps (CWE-325). These steps are often essential for preventing common attacks.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode:
- Manual Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode:
- Manual Static Analysis - Source Code:
- Automated Static Analysis - Source Code:
- Automated Static Analysis:
- Architecture or Design Review:
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.