When designing applications, developers are recommended to use secure design patterns, diligently planned threat modeling, and reference architectures that keep the application free of security gaps.

Lack of effective security controls in the design phase often results in an application being susceptible to many weaknesses, collectively known as insecure design vulnerabilities.

What is insecure design?

Insecure design typically refers to the development of systems, products, or applications that have vulnerabilities or weaknesses that can be exploited by attackers. It can encompass a range of issues related to the design phase of a project, where decisions about architecture, functionality, and security features are made. Insecure design can lead to various security risks and threats.

Threats in Insecure design

When developers, QA, and/or security teams neglect to foresee and assess risks in the code design stage, insecure design flaws result. These vulnerabilities also result from application designers failing to follow security best practices. Consistent threat modeling is necessary to mitigate design vulnerabilities as the threat landscape changes and to stop known attack techniques. Architectural defects like this are hard to find and fix without a secure design.

Threats in Insecure Design:

1. Unauthorized Access:

   • Weak authentication
   • Inadequate authorization
   • Absence of multi-factor authentication

2. Injection Attacks:

   • Poor input validation
   • Lack of parameterized queries
   • Vulnerability to SQL injection, XSS, and command injection

3. Data Breaches:

   • Insufficient data protection
   • Weak or no encryption
   • Storage of sensitive data in plaintext

4. Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks:

   • Lack of proper rate limiting
   • Resource exhaustion vulnerabilities
   • Failure to handle unexpected traffic spikes

5. Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR):

   • Poorly implemented access controls
   • Manipulation of references to gain unauthorized access
   • Accessing or modifying data through URL or form field manipulation

6. Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) Attacks:

   • Insecure communication channels
   • Lack of encryption or weak encryption protocols
   • Unauthenticated connections vulnerable to interception

7. Security Misconfigurations:

   • Improperly configured systems or applications
   • Default credentials
   • Unnecessary services running
   • Excessive permissions or misconfigured security settings

8. Security Bypass:

   • Circumventing authentication mechanisms
   • Exploiting design flaws in access controls

9. Elevation of Privilege:

   • Exploiting design flaws to escalate privileges
   • Gaining unauthorized access to higher levels of control

How to Prevent Insecure Design Vulnerabilities?

Teams of developers should use proven design patterns and factual design approaches in the application design process. To lower the application security risk associated with their workload, each team member should have access to threat models, tested component libraries, and security tools. It is recommended that security teams be involved from the outset of the development process and kept informed during the phases of development, integration, and deployment.

• Establish Continuous Unit and Integration Tests

• Enforce Granular Requirements and Resource Management

• Implement System and Network Layer Tier Segregation

Impacts of Insecure Design

Consequences of attacks on insecure design vulnerabilities vary depending on the scope of the attack, the data exposed, and the duration it continues till detection. Potential impacts of a successful exploit include:

• User and system enumeration
• Complete account takeover
• System and data breaches
• Denial of service by spoofing a server with multiple requests
• Privilege escalation for compromised, low-privilege accounts
• The execution of other attacks such as cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and path transversal

Examples of Insecure Design Vulnerabilities

• Verbose Error Message Leading to Path Transversal

• Injection As a Trust Boundary Violation Vulnerability

Happy Hacking

Happy learning