COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-693

Protection Mechanism Failure

The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the product.

Abstraction

Pillar

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the product.

Extended description

This weakness covers three distinct situations. A "missing" protection mechanism occurs when the application does not define any mechanism against a certain class of attack. An "insufficient" protection mechanism might provide some defenses - for example, against the most common attacks - but it does not protect against everything that is intended. Finally, an "ignored" mechanism occurs when a mechanism is available and in active use within the product, but the developer has not applied it in some code path.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Lifecycle phase

Operation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Bypass Protection Mechanism

Affected security scopes: Access Control

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

  • Follow secure coding guidelines for input handling and boundary checking.
  • Enforce strict security reviews and automated static analysis (SAST) checks.