BaseDraft

CWE-322Key Exchange without Entity Authentication

Category: auth

Description

The product performs a key exchange with an actor without verifying the identity of that actor. Performing a key exchange will preserve the integrity of the information sent between two entities, but this will not guarantee that the entities are who they claim they are. This may enable an attacker to impersonate an actor by modifying traffic between the two entities. Typically, this involves a victim client that contacts a malicious server that is impersonating a trusted server. If the client skips authentication or ignores an authentication failure, the malicious server may request authentication information from the user. The malicious server can then use this authentication information to log in to the trusted server using the victim's credentials, sniff traffic between the victim and trusted server, etc.

Common consequences· 2

  • Access Control — Bypass Protection Mechanism
    No authentication takes place in this process, bypassing an assumed protection of encryption.
  • Confidentiality — Read Application Data
    The encrypted communication between a user and a trusted host may be subject to sniffing by any actor in the communication path.

Potential mitigations· 2

  • [Architecture and Design]Ensure that proper authentication is included in the system design.
  • [Implementation]Understand and properly implement all checks necessary to ensure the identity of entities involved in encrypted communications.

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/322.html

(incoming)5

TypeTargetConfidenceTier
VulnerabilityCVE-2025-13914cve-2025-139140%live
VulnerabilityCVE-2025-20163cve-2025-201630%live
VulnerabilityCVE-2025-62501cve-2025-625010%live
VulnerabilityCVE-2026-1709cve-2026-17090%live
VulnerabilityCVE-2026-45361cve-2026-453610%live

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.

CWE
Channel Accessible by Non-Endpoint
CWE
Improper Enforcement of Message Integrity During Transmission in a Communication Channel
CWE
Use of Default Cryptographic Key
CWE
Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
CWE
Improper Verification of Source of a Communication Channel
CWE
Improper Validation of Certificate with Host Mismatch
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.