CWE-1428: Reliance on HTTP instead of HTTPS
Description
The product provides or relies on use of HTTP communications when HTTPS is available.
Because HTTP communications are not encrypted, HTTP is subject to various attacks against confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. However, unlike many other protocols, HTTPS is widely available as a more secure alternative, because it uses encryption.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Status
- Incomplete
Common consequences
- ConfidentialityIntegrity
Read Application Data; Modify Application Data
HTTP can be subjected to attacks against confidentiality (by reading cleartext packets); integrity (by modifying sessions); and authenticity (by compromising servers and/or clients using cache poisoning, phishing, or other attacks that enable attackers to spoof a legitimate entity in the communication channel).
Potential mitigations
- Architecture and Design
Explicitly require HTTPS or another mechanism that ensures that communication is encrypted.
- Implementation
Avoid using mixed content, i.e., serving a web page over HTTPS in which the page includes elements that use http: URLs. This is often done for images or other resources that do not seem to have privacy or security implications.
- ImplementationOperation
Perform HTTPS forcing, that is, redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS.
- Operation
If the product supports multiple protocols, ensure that encrypted protocols (such as HTTPS) are required, and remove any unencrypted protocols (such as HTTP).
Related weaknesses
Parent weaknesses
CAPEC attack patterns that exploit it
CWE 4.20 links no CAPEC attack pattern to this weakness.