CWE-640Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password

Description

Common consequences· 3

• Access Control — Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
  An attacker could gain unauthorized access to the system by retrieving legitimate user's authentication credentials.
• Availability — DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
  An attacker could deny service to legitimate system users by launching a brute force attack on the password recovery mechanism using user ids of legitimate users.
• Integrity / Other — Other
  The system's security functionality is turned against the system by the attacker.

Potential mitigations· 5

• [Architecture and Design]Make sure that all input supplied by the user to the password recovery mechanism is thoroughly filtered and validated.
• [Architecture and Design]Do not use standard weak security questions and use several security questions.
• [Architecture and Design]Make sure that there is throttling on the number of incorrect answers to a security question. Disable the password recovery functionality after a certain (small) number of incorrect guesses.
• [Architecture and Design]Require that the user properly answers the security question prior to resetting their password and sending the new password to the e-mail address of record.
• [Architecture and Design]Never allow the user to control what e-mail address the new password will be sent to in the password recovery mechanism.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 1

Exploits (incoming)1

(incoming)46

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Related by meaning· 6

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