CVE-2021-39226

Session content review can reveal authentication bypasses or failures in session establishment.

Assessments check authentication mechanisms for correct implementation and effectiveness, reducing successful authentication bypass attempts.

Identity providers centralize and enforce authentication mechanisms, reducing improper authentication.

Requires explicit authorization before any identifier can be assigned, preventing missing authorization.

Personnel screening, identity verification, and access-agreement requirements support reliable authentication and reduce authentication bypass opportunities.

Requiring explicit security roles and risk integration in the SDLC forces authentication mechanisms to be planned, documented, and validated instead of omitted or weakly implemented.

Decoy authentication surfaces detect bypass attempts and deflect real credential attacks through observable malicious interactions.

Requiring an access control policy ensures authorization checks are defined and applied for critical functions.

Requiring formal authorization of every access request before rights are granted ensures that checks for required permissions are performed, preventing missing authorization checks from being introduced.

Mandating segregated approval and oversight for non-human identities reduces the chance that weak or orphaned credentials can be exploited for unauthorized authentication.

A.5.17 directly mandates generation of non-guessable unique secrets, secure transmission, immediate change of defaults/temporary creds, strong password enforcement, no-reuse, and compromise response, which stops most improper-authentication exploits at source; the bounded remainder is non-password authentication methods and sufficiency-of-proof cases (e.g. IA-2/IA-5 enhancements) left to other controls.

A.5.18's provisioning, review, revocation and activation steps (incl. owner approval, SoD, timely removal on role/termination change) directly stop exploitation of missing authorization checks by ensuring no actor receives or retains rights to resources they should not access; the bounded remainder is that it cannot stop missing-authorization defects inside the enforcement mechanism itself once rights have been granted (e.g. flawed code that ignores the rights table).

By requiring competent outsiders to verify that every function enforces the need-to-know principle, the control lowers the likelihood that missing authorization checks persist undetected.

A.5.8 integrates risk assessment, requirements elicitation and governance into the project lifecycle so that authorization needs can be identified and specified; it does not itself perform or enforce authorization checks, so the missing-authorization weakness can still be present and exploitable.