Early Access — Mondoo Vulnerability Intelligence is currently in preview.
The product provides an Applications Programming Interface (API) or similar interface for interaction with external actors, but the interface includes a dangerous method or function that is not properly restricted.
If you must expose a method, make sure to perform input validation on all arguments, limit access to authorized parties, and protect against all possible vulnerabilities.
Exposing critical functionality essentially provides an attacker with the privilege level of the exposed functionality. This could result in the modification or exposure of sensitive data or possibly even execution of arbitrary code.
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.)