Security Resilience

CVE-2023-52111

Auth Bypass in Huawei Harmonyos 3.0.0 … 4.0.0

Published
16 January 2024
Modified
11 June 2025
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 7.5
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0028 19th percentile
Risk Priority 56 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2023-52111 is a high-severity Improper Authentication (CWE-287) vulnerability in Huawei Harmonyos. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).

Operationally, ranked at the 19th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-24 (Access Control Decisions) and AC-25 (Reference Monitor) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

Authorization vulnerability in the BootLoader module. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may affect service integrity.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2023-49246Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2024-9136Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2024-42038Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-52374Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-49239Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-52540Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-49240Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-52538Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-52955Same product: Huawei Emui
CVE-2023-39384Same product: Huawei Emui

Affected Assets

huawei
emui
13.0.0
huawei
harmonyos
3.0.0, 3.1.0, 4.0.0

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

AC-3 directly requires correct enforcement of authorization decisions on every access request, structurally preventing incorrect checks.

Mandates unique identification and authentication of organizational users before access, directly stopping improper authentication.

Requires unique identification and authentication of devices before establishing connections, preventing unauthenticated device claims.

Mandates unique identification and authentication of non-organizational users, directly addressing the weakness for external actors.

AC-24 ensures access-control decisions are made and applied consistently, reducing the chance of an incorrect authorization result.

A reference monitor that is always invoked and tamper-proof forces every authorization decision through a verified, correct path.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

blocks

Requiring consistency between access rights and classification plus formal approval steps ensures that the authorization logic correctly distinguishes between entities that should and should not be granted access.

blocks

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

blocks

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.

blocks

A.5.18's provisioning, revocation, review and adjustment of access rights (incl. before role changes/termination, with segregation and owner approval) directly stops incorrect authorization decisions from being exploitable in the vast majority of cases; the bounded remainder is incorrectness inside the authorization logic itself (e.g. flawed conditional or missing check) rather than rights that were wrongly granted.

blocks

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.

blocks

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.

Hardening callouts derived

DISA STIG baselines are authored against specific weaknesses. Where this CVE cites a broad weakness class, the mapping is not asserted at that abstraction (owner ruling, 2026-09-25: grade only at Base and below), so no rule is shown here rather than a rule shown against the wrong grain.

  • No fine-grained STIG row for CWE-287, a class-level weakness. Rules are authored against its narrower children: CWE-295, CWE-306.
  • No fine-grained STIG row for CWE-863, a class-level weakness, and none of its children carries one either.

References