CVE-2023-21817

Detects unauthorized successful logons resulting from improper authentication implementations.

Documented procedures ensure personnel are trained on authentication mechanisms, tangibly lowering the risk of improper authentication being exploited.

Security awareness training instructs users on secure authentication practices and avoiding credential compromise.

Training on authentication mechanisms and best practices decreases the occurrence of improper authentication.

Non-repudiation requires strong authentication mechanisms to irrefutably attribute performed actions to specific individuals or processes.

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

Review of authentication-related audit records can detect improper authentication mechanisms or bypasses.

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

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.

Security requirements specified early and verified through testing drive the consistent implementation of authentication mechanisms, decreasing the likelihood that authentication steps are omitted or incorrectly applied.

A.8.26 explicitly requires identifying and addressing authentication-related requirements (including level of trust in identity via 8.5 and 5.17) as part of application development or acquisition, which prevents a slice of CWE-287 but leaves the dominant sufficiency-of-proof aspects (IA-2/IA-5) and many implementation defects untouched.

A.8.27 mandates security-by-design principles (least privilege, default-deny, never-trust/always-verify, MFA, end-to-end encryption of requests, distrust-external-input, secure session control, and explicit authentication/authorization in every layer), which directly stops most improper-authentication flaws from being exploitable; the bounded remainder is insufficient-proof cases that live only in the strength or correctness of the credential itself (IA-5/IA-2 territory).

A.8.5 directly mandates appropriate-strength authentication techniques, MFA for critical systems, protected log-on procedures, brute-force resistance, no cleartext passwords/transmission, and session controls that stop exploitation of insufficient proof of identity; the bounded remainder is cases where the chosen technique itself is flawed or insufficiently implemented (e.g. weak biometrics without fallback).