Weakness (CWE)

CWE-296: Improper Following of a Certificate's Chain of Trust

Base Draft

The product does not follow, or incorrectly follows, the chain of trust for a certificate back to a trusted root certificate.

More detail

There are several ways in which the chain of trust might be broken, including but not limited to:

- Any certificate in the chain is self-signed, unless it is the root.

- Not every intermediate certificate is checked, starting from the original certificate all the way up to the root certificate.

- An intermediate, CA-signed certificate does not have the expected Basic Constraints or other important extensions.

- The root certificate has been compromised or authorized to the wrong party.

How to prevent it (3 mitigations)

Architecture and Design

Ensure that proper certificate checking is included in the system design.
Implementation

Understand, and properly implement all checks necessary to ensure the integrity of certificate trust integrity.
Implementation

If certificate pinning is being used, ensure that all relevant properties of the certificate are fully validated before the certificate is pinned, including the full chain of trust.

Nothing found.