CWE-300: Channel Accessible by Non-Endpoint

Description

The product does not adequately verify the identity of actors at both ends of a communication channel, or does not adequately ensure the integrity of the channel, in a way that allows the channel to be accessed or influenced by an actor that is not an endpoint.

In order to establish secure communication between two parties, it is often important to adequately verify the identity of entities at each end of the communication channel. Inadequate or inconsistent verification may result in insufficient or incorrect identification of either communicating entity. This can have negative consequences such as misplaced trust in the entity at the other end of the channel. An attacker can leverage this by interposing between the communicating entities and masquerading as the original entity. In the absence of sufficient verification of identity, such an attacker can eavesdrop and potentially modify the communication between the original entities.

Potential Impact

Demonstrative Examples

Socket sock;PrintWriter out;
                     try {
                        sock = new Socket(REMOTE_HOST, REMOTE_PORT);out = new PrintWriter(echoSocket.getOutputStream(), true);
                           
                           // Write data to remote host via socket output stream.
                           ...
                     }

Mitigations & Prevention

Detection Methods

• Automated Dynamic Analysis — Some tools can act as proxy servers that allow the tester to intercept packets or messages, inspect them, and modify them before sending them to the destination in order to see if the modified packets are still accepted by the receiving component.
• Automated Dynamic Analysis — Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools can be used to detect network traffic without encryption and/or verification. The affected protocol may be subject to Adversary-in-the-Middle attacks. Some tools act as proxy servers that allow the tester to inspect and modify packets/messages to se
• Automated Static Analysis Moderate — Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then sea

Real-World CVE Examples

Related Weaknesses

Taxonomy Mappings

• PLOVER: — Man-in-the-middle (MITM)
• WASC: 32 — Routing Detour
• The CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Java (2011): SEC06-J — Do not rely on the default automatic signature verification provided by URLClassLoader and java.util.jar