CVE-2023-38640

Procedures support proper permission assignment for critical resources through documented controls.

Attribute management for resources provides a mechanism to assign and maintain correct permissions based on security labels.

Prevents overly permissive assignments to critical resources by limiting to task needs.

Training policy covers correct permission assignment, reducing the ability to exploit incorrect permission assignments for critical resources.

Training on permission management reduces incorrect permission assignments for critical resources.

Audit logs and logging tools are critical resources whose protection requires correct permission assignments to block unauthorized actions.

Assessments review permission assignments on critical resources to confirm correctness, mitigating exploitation via incorrect permissions.

Certification includes checking that permissions on critical resources are correctly assigned.

A.5.1 only requires the existence of an overarching policy and topic-specific policies (including on access control); it does not itself enforce, implement, or act on permissions and therefore cannot stop CWE-732 from being exploitable.

A.5.12 only defines and communicates a classification scheme (with owners accountable for applying it); it does not itself enforce, restrict or decide any permissions, so the CWE-732 permission flaw can still be present and exploitable.

A.5.15 directly requires determining access needs, defining and communicating an access control policy, implementing rules that map rights/restrictions to entities (including consistency with classification), and considering need-to-know, privileged restrictions, segregation, formal authorization, and dynamic factors — which squarely stops most incorrect permission assignments from being exploitable; the bounded remainder is misconfigurations that violate the policy itself.

A.5.18 directly governs the provisioning, review, adjustment and revocation of logical access rights (including for critical resources) according to business needs, policy, SoD and risk, which stops most unintended actors from reading/modifying via incorrect permissions; the bounded remainder is incorrect permission assignments that are not access-right decisions at all (e.g. filesystem umask, ACL syntax errors).

Documented responsibility for protecting assets encourages correct permission settings rather than leaving them at insecure defaults.

Monitoring supplier policy changes and conducting audits can reveal incorrect permission assignments on resources managed by the supplier, prompting corrective action before they are exploited.