CWE-296: Improper Following of a Certificate's Chain of Trust
Description
The product does not follow, or incorrectly follows, the chain of trust for a certificate back to a trusted root certificate.
There are several ways in which the chain of trust might be broken, including but not limited to: Any certificate in the chain is self-signed, unless it is the root. Not every intermediate certificate is checked, starting from the original certificate all the way up to the root certificate. An intermediate, CA-signed certificate does not have the expected Basic Constraints or other important extensions. The root certificate has been compromised or authorized to the wrong party.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Low
- Status
- Draft
Common consequences
- Non-Repudiation
Hide Activities
Exploitation of this flaw can lead to the trust of data that may have originated with a spoofed source.
- IntegrityConfidentialityAvailabilityAccess Control
Gain Privileges or Assume Identity; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
Data, requests, or actions taken by the attacking entity can be carried out as a spoofed benign entity.
Potential mitigations
- Architecture and Design
Ensure that proper certificate checking is included in the system design.
- Implementation
Understand, and properly implement all checks necessary to ensure the integrity of certificate trust integrity.
- Implementation
If certificate pinning is being used, ensure that all relevant properties of the certificate are fully validated before the certificate is pinned, including the full chain of trust.
Related weaknesses
CAPEC attack patterns that exploit it
CWE 4.20 links no CAPEC attack pattern to this weakness.