Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses for 2022

What is CWE Top 25?

The Common Weakness Enumeration, or CWE, is a broad catalog of security vulnerabilities. These weaknesses are extremely dangerous since they are easily discovered and exploited, and adversaries can use them to interrupt application performance, steal data, or seize a system. CWE Top 25 is a great resource for the community that helps Developers, Testers, Users, Project Managers, Security Researchers, and Educators. They now examine this list to understand the most common and dangerous software weaknesses.

Methodology for the CWE Top 25

The CWE Team used data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) for 2020-2021 to generate the latest status of the CWE Top 25. The experts then used their formula to find the ranking order. This formula considers the frequency with which a defect (CWE) is the primary source of a vulnerability and the possibility of attack. The formula was created to tacitly endorse the frequency and anticipated severity concerning their minimum and maximum values. The CWE top 25 is updated annually.

The methodology determines the number of times Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) refer to Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to determine the frequency of occurrence. Only CVEs that refer to CWE are used in the methodology. The methodology will produce extremely low-frequency rates and a negligible difference between the various flaws if the entire data set is used.

CWE's Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses in 2022

The Common Weakness Enumeration team announced the release of the Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses list for 2022 on June 28. This year's top five bugs include out-of-bounds writes, cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, improper input validation, and out-of-bounds read. Here is the list of CWE's top 25 weaknesses:

Key Points

There are several significant changes in the listed positions of weakness types from the previous year's list, including many weaknesses that have disappeared or entered the Top 25 for the first time.

The following are the biggest climbers:

• Concurrent execution using the shared resources with improper synchronization (race Condition), from 33 to 22
• ?Improper control of generation of code that is code injection, from 28 to 25
• Command injection, from 25 to 17
• NULL pointer dereference, from 25 to 11
• Uncontrolled resource consumption, from 27 to 23

The most significant downward movers include

• Missing authentication for critical function, from 11 to 18
• Exposure of sensitive information to an unauthorized actor, from 20 to 33
• Insufficiently protected credentials, from 21 to 38
• Incorrect assignment of permissions for critical resources, from 22 to 30

There are new Top 25 entries, including:

• Concurrent execution using the shared resources with improper synchronization (race condition), from 33 to 22
• Improper control of generation of code that is code injection, from 28 to 25
• Uncontrolled resource consumption, from 27 to 23

Excluded entries from the Top 25 include:

• Exposure to an unauthorized actor of sensitive information, from 20 to 33
• Insufficiently protected credentials, from 21 to 38
• Incorrect permission assignment for the critical resources, from 22 to 30

Conclusion

Other frequent attacks, such as Uncontrolled resource consumption, and Improper control of the generation of code, are included in the CWE list. The most common attacks, however, continue to have existed virtually since the inception of the web server.