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.

Submission Date :

July 19, 2006, midnight

Modification Date :

2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00

Organization :

MITRE
Extended Description

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.

Example Vulnerable Codes

Example - 1

In the Java snippet below, data is sent over an unencrypted channel to a remote server.



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

By eavesdropping on the communication channel or posing as the endpoint, an attacker would be able to read all of the transmitted data.

Related Weaknesses

This table shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined to give an overview of the different insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction.

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