CWE WEAKNESSES  /  CWE-656

CWE-656

Reliance on Security Through Obscurity

What it is

The product uses a protection mechanism whose strength depends heavily on its obscurity, such that knowledge of its algorithms or key data is sufficient to defeat the mechanism.

This reliance on "security through obscurity" can produce resultant weaknesses if an attacker is able to reverse engineer the inner workings of the mechanism. Note that obscurity can be one small part of defense in depth, since it can create more work for an attacker; however, it is a significant risk if used as the primary means of protection.

Impact

Mitigations

• [Architecture and Design] Always consider whether knowledge of your code or design is sufficient to break it. Reverse engineering is a highly successful discipline, and financially feasible for motivated adversaries. Black-box techniques are established for binary analysis of executables that use obfuscation, runtime analysis of proprietary protocols, inferring file formats, and others.
• [Architecture and Design] When available, use publicly-vetted algorithms and procedures, as these are more likely to undergo more extensive security analysis and testing. This is especially the case with encryption and authentication.

Real-world CVE examples

• CVE-2006-6588 — Reliance on hidden form fields in a web application. Many web application vulnerabilities exist because the developer did not consider that "hidden" form fields
• CVE-2006-7142 — Hard-coded cryptographic key stored in executable program.
• CVE-2005-4002 — Hard-coded cryptographic key stored in executable program.
• CVE-2006-4068 — Hard-coded hashed values for username and password contained in client-side script, allowing brute-force offline attacks.

Related weaknesses

Source: MITRE CWE. View on cwe.mitre.org →