COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-324

Use of a Key Past its Expiration Date

The product uses a cryptographic key or password past its expiration date, which diminishes its safety significantly by increasing the timing window for cracking attacks against that key.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Low

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product uses a cryptographic key or password past its expiration date, which diminishes its safety significantly by increasing the timing window for cracking attacks against that key.

Extended description

While the expiration of keys does not necessarily ensure that they are compromised, it is a significant concern that keys which remain in use for prolonged periods of time have a decreasing probability of integrity. For this reason, it is important to replace keys within a period of time proportional to their strength.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

REALIZATION: This weakness is caused during implementation of an architectural security tactic.

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Bypass Protection MechanismGain Privileges or Assume Identity

Affected security scopes: Access Control

The cryptographic key in question may be compromised, providing a malicious user with a method for authenticating as the victim.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Adequate consideration should be put in to the user interface in order to notify users previous to the key's expiration, to explain the importance of new key generation and to walk users through the process as painlessly as possible.