CWE-296: Improper Following of a Certificate's Chain of Trust

Extended Description

Any certificate in the chain is self-signed, unless it 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.

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.

Non-Repudiation

Hide Activities

Exploitation of this flaw can lead to the trust of data that may have originated with a spoofed source.

Integrity

Confidentiality

Availability

Access 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.

Automated Static Analysis

Effectiveness: High

Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)