CWE-291Reliance on IP Address for Authentication

Abstraction: Variant · CVEs in our corpus: 11

The product uses an IP address for authentication.

IP addresses can be easily spoofed. Attackers can forge the source IP address of the packets they send, but response packets will return to the forged IP address. To see the response packets, the attacker has to sniff the traffic between the victim machine and the forged IP address. In order to accomplish the required sniffing, attackers typically attempt to locate themselves on the same subnet as the victim machine. Attackers may be able to circumvent this requirement by using source routing, but source routing is disabled across much of the Internet today. In summary, IP address verification can be a useful part of an authentication scheme, but it should not be the single factor required for authentication.

Last updated: 14 October 2026 20:41 UTC

OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)

This weakness contributes to A07:2025 Authentication Failures.

Control responseHuman-reviewed

Answering this weakness across the control lifecycle, from our framework cross-walks.

Prevent

Stop it (NIST 800-53 / CSF Protect)

IA-3 Device Identification and Authentication
PR.AA-03
PR.AA-01
PR.AA-05

Detect

Catch it (CSF Detect / Respond)

DE.CM-01

Harden

Shrink the surface (DISA STIG)

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Validate

Prove the fix (OWASP ASVS)

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NIST 800-53 r5 controls PROPOSED for this weakness (1)AI-assisted

These are model PROPOSALS, not graded mappings. They come from controls_to_cwe_proposals, which carries no grade field at all; across the CWE pages 1,540 of 1,722 such associations (89%) have never been graded by anything. The heading said “address” until 2026-09-29, which asserted a relationship the data does not carry. Graded cross-walks are on the framework map, not here.

Control	Title	Family	Why it addresses this CWE
`IA-3`	Device Identification and Authentication	IA	Mandates proper device-level authentication instead of weaker identifiers such as IP addresses that are easily forged.

Top CVEs of this weakness type, ranked by Risk Priority

CVE	Risk	CVSS	EPSS	Published
`CVE-2026-4252`	7.7	9.8	0.0206	2026-03-16
`CVE-2025-66602`	7.2	9.8	0.0035	2026-02-09
`CVE-2022-46415`	6.7	9.1	0.0091	2023-03-27
`CVE-2025-34202`	6.7	8.8	0.0098	2025-09-19
`CVE-2024-23309`	6.5	9.0	0.0092	2024-10-30
`CVE-2026-3690`	5.8	7.4	0.0063	2026-04-11
`CVE-2023-7211`	4.7	5.6	0.0094	2024-01-07
`CVE-2023-35906`	4.4	5.3	0.0037	2023-09-05
`CVE-2024-32765`	3.4	4.2	0.0021	2024-08-12
`CVE-2026-86485`	2.8	3.3	0.0016	2026-09-07