CWE-637: Unnecessary Complexity in Protection Mechanism (Not Using 'Economy of Mechanism')
Description
The product uses a more complex mechanism than necessary, which could lead to resultant weaknesses when the mechanism is not correctly understood, modeled, configured, implemented, or used.
Submission Date :
Jan. 18, 2008, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-10-26 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
Purdue University
Extended Description
Security mechanisms should be as simple as possible. Complex security mechanisms may engender partial implementations and compatibility problems, with resulting mismatches in assumptions and implemented security. A corollary of this principle is that data specifications should be as simple as possible, because complex data specifications result in complex validation code. Complex tasks and systems may also need to be guarded by complex security checks, so simple systems should be preferred.
Example - 1
The IPSEC specification is complex, which resulted in bugs, partial implementations, and incompatibilities between vendors.
Example - 2
HTTP Request Smuggling (CWE-444) attacks are feasible because there are not stringent requirements for how illegal or inconsistent HTTP headers should be handled. This can lead to inconsistent implementations in which a proxy or firewall interprets the same data stream as a different set of requests than the end points in that stream.
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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