Cyber Resilience

CWE · MITRE source

CWE-291Reliance on IP Address for Authentication

Abstraction: Variant · CVEs in our corpus: 10

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: 20 August 2026 14:15 UTC

Cumulative inbound coverage

How completely the frameworks we cross-walk collectively cover this — the verdict is the strongest single mapping (overlapping partials are not summed); breadth shows the corroboration behind it.

Collective: partial · 1 mapping(s) from 1 framework(s): CAPEC 1 (partial)

See the full cumulative-coverage rollup →

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 that address this weakness (1)AI-assisted

Control Title Family Why it addresses this CWE
IA-3Device Identification and AuthenticationIAMandates 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 7.59.80.01262026-03-16
CVE-2025-66602 7.29.80.00302026-02-09
CVE-2022-46415 6.79.10.00912023-03-27
CVE-2025-34202 6.78.80.00982025-09-19
CVE-2024-23309 6.59.00.00912024-10-30
CVE-2026-3690 5.87.40.00672026-04-11
CVE-2023-7211 4.75.60.00942024-01-07
CVE-2023-35906 4.45.30.00312023-09-05
CVE-2024-32765 3.44.20.00212024-08-12