I wish we could turn this stuff off completely. The old guidance on password aging and complexity has been deprecated for quite some time now.
There are still lots of organizations out there that require their vendors to adhere to bad security practices like password rotation. I suspect it's tied to various compliance regimes. So for example our AD has to have quarterly password rotation to satisfy some big banks, even though it's been widely accepted to be a bad practice (long before NIST got around to updating their guidance). Wildly frustrating. I feel like it's our responsibility not to encourage bad practices but we need a migration path to deprecate these completely. I would suggest very prominent warning text with links to the NIST guidelines as well as a planned deprecation date. I believe we have done scheduled deprecation of other CWEs in the past, so there is some precedent. I do like the addition of "Reliance on Password Aging" as a new node. While we're at it "Reliance on Password Complexity Rules" or similar might be worth adding too as complexity and aging are separate items. From: Steven M Christey <co...@mitre.org> Sent: Friday, December 3, 2021 1:49 PM To: Seifried, Kurt <k...@seifried.org>; CWE Research Discussion <cwe-research-list@mitre.org> Subject: [EXTERNAL] RE: Time to retire CWE-262 and CWE-263 This email originated from outside of Veracode. ________________________________ Kurt, For a while, I've been wondering what to do about these. We have a Status value of "Obsolete" which might be useful, or we could outright deprecate them. At the absolute minimum, actively discouraging the practice makes sense. However, we still need to account for the CWE use cases in which real-world code - for whatever reason - is still using password aging. We have to allow for multiple software development models and contexts for product users. Some kind of CWE entry still needs to be available for people to point out the mistake. So perhaps a new entry like "Reliance on Password Aging" could be created, and these two could be deprecated. I'd love to hear broader discussion from others on this list. Is it time to deprecate these two entries outright? Are there any legitimate cases where password aging still makes sense (even from a practical standpoint)? Or maybe keep CWE-263 since it's a followon weakness that occurs because of that bad choice? Thanks, Steve From: Kurt Seifried <k...@seifried.org<mailto:k...@seifried.org>> Sent: Friday, December 3, 2021 12:57 PM To: CWE Research Discussion <cwe-research-list@mitre.org<mailto:cwe-research-list@mitre.org>> Subject: Time to retire CWE-262 and CWE-263 Not Using Password Aging - (262) https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/262.html<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcwe.mitre.org%2Fdata%2Fdefinitions%2F262.html&data=04%7C01%7Cceng%40veracode.com%7C1807b4748a064901b1ed08d9b68d8aa4%7C3b627b68f21c4ed79fe3698efdedbe21%7C0%7C0%7C637741541307956933%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=1H7BzacBgEdFfXoHWZbx0e4yWn%2B9Bii64feJrrtEMLI%3D&reserved=0> Password Aging with Long Expiration - (263) https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/263.html<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcwe.mitre.org%2Fdata%2Fdefinitions%2F263.html&data=04%7C01%7Cceng%40veracode.com%7C1807b4748a064901b1ed08d9b68d8aa4%7C3b627b68f21c4ed79fe3698efdedbe21%7C0%7C0%7C637741541307956933%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=4bTVhbnmwZh489HRsDMd7DsaQAMoa2jUZyxdVAEsa0g%3D&reserved=0> REFERENCES needs updating with: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpages.nist.gov%2F800-63-3%2Fsp800-63b.html&data=04%7C01%7Cceng%40veracode.com%7C1807b4748a064901b1ed08d9b68d8aa4%7C3b627b68f21c4ed79fe3698efdedbe21%7C0%7C0%7C637741541308113156%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=55zPRQmJacQMde0fKUHeR%2Fk07VEt5RHKD8Pnw5Oe4Do%3D&reserved=0> 5.1.1.2 Memorized Secret Verifiers Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator. And ideally, we should rewrite BOTH of these CWE's to state "these are retired/wrong" -- Kurt Seifried (He/Him) k...@seifried.org<mailto:k...@seifried.org>
