CWE-638: Not Using Complete Mediation

Description

The product does not perform access checks on a resource every time the resource is accessed by an entity, which can create resultant weaknesses if that entity's rights or privileges change over time.

Submission Date :

Jan. 18, 2008, midnight

Modification Date :

2023-10-26 00:00:00+00:00

Organization :

Purdue University
Example Vulnerable Codes

Example - 1

When executable library files are used on web servers, which is common in PHP applications, the developer might perform an access check in any user-facing executable, and omit the access check from the library file itself. By directly requesting the library file (CWE-425), an attacker can bypass this access check.

Example - 2

When a developer begins to implement input validation for a web application, often the validation is performed in each area of the code that uses externally-controlled input. In complex applications with many inputs, the developer often misses a parameter here or a cookie there. One frequently-applied solution is to centralize all input validation, store these validated inputs in a separate data structure, and require that all access of those inputs must be through that data structure. An alternate approach would be to use an external input validation framework such as Struts, which performs the validation before the inputs are ever processed by the code.

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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