The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection
mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the
product.
Extended Description
This weakness covers three distinct situations. A "missing" protection
mechanism occurs when the application does not define any mechanism against
a certain class of attack. An "insufficient" protection mechanism might
provide some defenses - for example, against the most common attacks - but
it does not protect against everything that is intended. Finally, an
"ignored" mechanism occurs when a mechanism is available and in active use
within the product, but the developer has not applied it in some code
path.
Time of Introduction
Architecture and Design
Implementation
Operation
Applicable Platforms
Languages
All
Other Notes
This is a fairly high-level concept, although it covers a number of
weaknesses in CWE that were more scattered throughout the natural hierarchy
before Draft 9 was released.
The concept of protection mechanisms is well established, but protection
mechanism failures have not been studied comprehensively. It is suspected
that protection mechanisms can have significantly different types of
weaknesses than the weaknesses that they are intended to prevent.
Description
