CWE-940: Improper Verification of Source of a Communication Channel
Official CWE-940 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-940: Improper Verification of Source of a Communication Channel
Improper Verification of Source of a Communication Channel represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control,Other: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Varies by Context,Bypass Protection Mechanism: An attacker can access any functionality that is inadvertently accessible to the source.
Developer Pattern
CWE-940 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-940, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-940: Improper Verification of Source of a Communication Channel
The product establishes a communication channel to handle an incoming request that has been initiated by an actor, but it does not properly verify that the request is coming from the expected origin.
When an attacker can successfully establish a communication channel from an untrusted origin, the attacker may be able to gain privileges and access unexpected functionality.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This Android application will remove a user account when it receives an intent to do so: This application does not check the origin of the intent, thus allowing any malicious application to remove a user. Always check the origin of an intent, or create an allowlist of trusted applications using the manifest.xml file.
- These Android and iOS applications intercept URL loading within a WebView and perform special actions if a particular URL scheme is used, thus allowing the Javascript within the WebView to communicate with the application: A call into native code can then be initiated by passing parameters within the URL:,Because the application does not check the source, a malicious website loaded within this WebView has the same access to the API as a trusted site.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: [object Object]
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.