COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-655

Insufficient Psychological Acceptability

The product has a protection mechanism that is too difficult or inconvenient to use, encouraging non-malicious users to disable or bypass the mechanism, whether by accident or on purpose.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product has a protection mechanism that is too difficult or inconvenient to use, encouraging non-malicious users to disable or bypass the mechanism, whether by accident or on purpose.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Bypass Protection Mechanism

Affected security scopes: Access Control

By bypassing the security mechanism, a user might leave the system in a less secure state than intended by the administrator, making it more susceptible to compromise.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Testing

Testing and verification approach

Detail
Where possible, perform human factors and usability studies to identify where your product's security mechanisms are difficult to use, and why.

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Make the security mechanism as seamless as possible, while also providing the user with sufficient details when a security decision produces unexpected results.