Cross Cutting

A category in the Common Weakness Enumeration published by The MITRE Corporation.


Summary

Categories in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) group entries based on some common characteristic or attribute.

Weaknesses in this category are related to the design and architecture of multiple security tactics and how they affect a system. For example, information exposure can impact the Limit Access and Limit Exposure security tactics. The weaknesses in this category could lead to a degradation of the quality of many capabilities if they are not addressed when designing or implementing a secure architecture.

Weaknesses

Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security

The product is composed of a server that relies on the client to implement a mechanism that is intended to protect the server.

Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions

The product does not check or incorrectly checks for unusual or exceptional conditions that are not expected to occur frequently during day to day operation of the pro...

Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions

The product does not properly anticipate or handle exceptional conditions that rarely occur during normal operation of the product.

Improper Cleanup on Thrown Exception

The product does not clean up its state or incorrectly cleans up its state when an exception is thrown, leading to unexpected state or control flow.

Missing Report of Error Condition

The product encounters an error but does not provide a status code or return value to indicate that an error has occurred.

Missing Standardized Error Handling Mechanism

The product does not use a standardized method for handling errors throughout the code, which might introduce inconsistent error handling and resultant weaknesses.

Observable Timing Discrepancy

Two separate operations in a product require different amounts of time to complete, in a way that is observable to an actor and reveals security-relevant information a...

Reliance on Cookies without Validation and Integrity Checking in a Security Decision

The product uses a protection mechanism that relies on the existence or values of a cookie, but it does not properly ensure that the cookie is valid for the associated...

Reliance on Untrusted Inputs in a Security Decision

The product uses a protection mechanism that relies on the existence or values of an input, but the input can be modified by an untrusted actor in a way that bypasses ...

Concepts

Architectural Concepts

This view organizes weaknesses according to common architectural security tactics. It is intended to assist architects in identifying potential mistakes that can be ma...

See Also

  1. A Catalog of Security Architecture Weaknesses.

    2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)

  2. Understanding Software Vulnerabilities Related to Architectural Security Tactics: An Empirical Investigation of Chromium, PHP and Thunderbird.

    2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)


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