The description above is MITRE’s definition of CWE-489 in CWE 4.20, a base-level weakness.
Common consequences MITRE lists
- Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Access Control, Other: Bypass Protection Mechanism; Read Application Data; Gain Privileges or Assume Identity; Varies by Context
Guides on this site
Handle failures without leaking internals or weakening controls
Give callers a useful, bounded response while preserving protected diagnostic evidence and safe application state.
Ship without debug modes, verbose errors or exposed files
Turn off debug output, publish an allowlisted build and probe each deployment for exposed files and endpoints.
Preserve framework security controls across the request lifecycle
Trace middleware, persistence and rendering so custom code does not bypass the protections supplied by the framework.
Practice
- Secure a real HTTP API · Local project
References
This page is generated from MITRE’s CWE 4.20 catalogue (released 30 April 2026) and lists every guide, fix card and lab here that cites CWE-489.
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