MITRE lately launched its yearly listing of the 2024 CWE High 25 Most Harmful Software program Weaknesses.
This listing differs from lists that comprise the commonest vulnerabilities, as it’s not a listing of vulnerabilities, however moderately weaknesses in system design that may be exploited to leverage vulnerabilities.
“By definition, code injection is an assault, and after we take into consideration the High 25 it’s figuring out the weaknesses beneath,” stated Alec Summers, mission chief for the CVE and CWE applications at MITRE.
These weaknesses can doubtlessly pave the way in which for vulnerabilities and assaults, so it’s necessary to concentrate on them and mitigate them as a lot as potential.
In line with Summers, one pattern on this 12 months’s listing is that whereas some weaknesses moved up or down the listing, numerous the weaknesses on the listing are traditional weaknesses which have been round for years, akin to people who allow SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
“The extra you perceive these weaknesses, and also you draw connections between these items, you may truly begin to remove complete lessons of issues that we see so many occasions,” he stated.
Addressing these weaknesses not solely improves product safety, but in addition has the potential to save lots of firms cash as a result of “the extra weaknesses we keep away from in product improvement, the much less vulnerabilities to handle after deployment,” he defined.
This 12 months’s listing consists of the next weaknesses:
- Improper Neutralization of Enter Throughout Net Web page Era (‘Cross-site Scripting’)
- Out-of-bounds Write
- Improper Neutralization of Particular Components utilized in an SQL Command (‘SQL Injection’)
- Cross-Website Request Forgery (CSRF)
- Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Listing (‘Path Traversal’)
- Out-of-bounds Learn
- Improper Neutralization of Particular Components utilized in an OS Command (‘OS Command Injection’)
- Use After Free
- Lacking Authorization
- Unrestricted Add of File with Harmful Kind
- Improper Management of Era of Code (‘Code Injection’)
- Improper Enter Validation
- Improper Neutralization of Particular Components utilized in a Command (‘Command Injection’)
- Improper Authentication
- Improper Privilege Administration
- Deserialization of Untrusted Knowledge
- Publicity of Delicate Data to an Unauthorized Actor
- Incorrect Authorization
- Server-Aspect Request Forgery (SSRF)
- Improper Restriction of Operations throughout the Bounds of a Reminiscence Buffer
- NULL Pointer Dereference
- Use of Laborious-coded Credentials
- Integer Overflow or Wraparound
- Uncontrolled Useful resource Consumption
- Lacking Authentication for Crucial Perform
The dataset the listing relies on consists of data for 31,779 Widespread Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) printed between June 1, 2023 and June 1, 2024.
In line with Summers, this 12 months, the technique wherein the listing was created was totally different than in previous years as a result of MITRE and CISA concerned the broader safety neighborhood to research the dataset, whereas in earlier years MITRE’s Widespread Weak spot Enumeration (CWE) workforce labored alone.
This may increasingly have resulted in lots of adjustments from earlier years, and this 12 months’s listing solely featured three weaknesses that retained the identical rating as final 12 months: #3 Improper Neutralization of Particular Components utilized in an SQL Command (‘SQL Injection’), #10 Unrestricted Add of File with Harmful Kind, and #19 Server-Aspect Request Forgery (SSRF).
The weaknesses that had the most important upward transfer from final 12 months’s listing are #4 Cross-Website Request Forgery, which moved up 5 ranks; #11 Improper Management of Era of Code (‘Code Injection’), which moved up 12 ranks; #15 Improper Privilege Administration, which moved up seven ranks; and #18 Incorrect Authorization, which moved up six ranks.
Weaknesses that moved down in rank considerably embody #12 Improper Enter Validation, which moved down six ranks; #21 NULL Pointer Dereference, which moved down 9 ranks; #23 Integer Overflow or Wraparound, which moved down 9 ranks; and #25 Lacking Authentication for Crucial Perform, which moved down 5 ranks.
This 12 months additionally noticed two new entries to the listing and two entries that left the High 25. New entries embody #17 Publicity of Delicate Data to an Unauthorized Actor and #24 Uncontrolled Useful resource Consumption. Earlier entries now not within the High 25 are Concurrent Execution utilizing Shared Useful resource with Improper Synchronization (‘Race Situation’) and Incorrect Default Permissions.
In line with MITRE, one potential explanation for the adjustments is that they didn’t obtain CWE mappings from the U.S. Nationwide Vulnerability Database analysts for the CVE data from the primary half of 2024.
“It isn’t clear whether or not these gaps have an effect on the relative rankings, for the reason that distribution of unmapped CVEs appears prone to align roughly with the CWE distribution of the whole information set,” MITRE wrote.
