CWE-649 - Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking

Weakness Name

Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking

Description

The product uses obfuscation or encryption of inputs that should not be mutable by an external actor, but the product does not use integrity checks to detect if those inputs have been modified.

When an application relies on obfuscation or incorrectly applied / weak encryption to protect client-controllable tokens or parameters, that may have an effect on the user state, system state, or some decision made on the server. Without protecting the tokens/parameters for integrity, the application is vulnerable to an attack where an adversary traverses the space of possible values of the said token/parameter in order to attempt to gain an advantage. The goal of the attacker is to find another admissible value that will somehow elevate their privileges in the system, disclose information or change the behavior of the system in some way beneficial to the attacker. If the application does not protect these critical tokens/parameters for integrity, it will not be able to determine that these values have been tampered with. Measures that are used to protect data for confidentiality should not be relied upon to provide the integrity service.

Common Consequences

Related Weaknesses

CWE-345Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity