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Looking back at the 2022 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses

by GuardRails on January 31, 2023

What is CWE?

The Common Weakness Enumeration, often known as CWE, is a method that classifies software and hardware security weaknesses, also known as implementation faults, that might result in vulnerabilities. It is sustained by a community project with the goals of understanding flaws and creating automated tools to identify, fix, and prevent them.

The MITRE Corporation manages CWE, and the National Cyber Security Division and US-CERT assist it. The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) has over 600 categories explaining many vulnerabilities and flaws.

CWE’s Mission and Purpose

CWE’s mission is to eliminate security flaws and problems by training software developers to create higher-quality products that are resistant to exploitation. The primary objective of the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) is to educate software and hardware architects, designers, programmers, and acquirers on how to eliminate the most common mistakes before products are delivered. This is done to prevent vulnerabilities at their point of origin. In addition, CWE is a resource that programmers may use when developing code to help prevent vulnerabilities throughout the development process. CWEs are employed by Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) technologies to construct rules and workflows that automate remediation.

In the end, the utilization of CWE assists in preventing security vulnerabilities that have plagued the software and hardware sectors and placed businesses in jeopardy.

CWE assists software developers and security professionals in the following activities:

Categorize and describe the flaws in both the software and the hardware using a standard language.
Examine the already available software and hardware for any potential vulnerabilities.
Analyze the coverage provided by the tools that address these issues.
Utilize a unified baseline norm in order to facilitate the discovery, mitigation, and prevention of any weaknesses.
Before deployment, take precautions to prevent software and hardware vulnerabilities.

CWE Top 25, what is it?

The MITRE organization is responsible for compiling a list of vulnerabilities known as the CWE Top 25. The Common Weaknesses and Exposures (CWE) database lists the most widespread security flaws that can have a significant negative effect. It is the product of continuing study, which included interviews and surveys of people working in the security industry and suppliers and developers.

The CWE Top 25 is a mapping of information from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), which the United States government maintains. The severity ratings are derived from the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The scoring algorithm utilizes a data-driven strategy to identify the severity of the vulnerabilities and refresh the list regularly.

CWE 2022 Top 25 List

The vulnerabilities in the 2022 CWE Top 25 are listed here, along with their total score.

CWE-787 – out-of-bounds writing. Severity score: 64.20
CWE-79 – improperly neutralizing input when generating web pages (cross-site scripting). Severity score: 45.97.
CWE-89 – improperly neutralizing special elements in SQL commands (SQL injection). Severity score: 22.11
CWE-20 – improperly validating input. Severity score: 20.63.
CWE-125 – out-of-bounds reading. Severity score: 17.67.
CWE-78 – improperly neutralizing special elements in operating system commands (OS command injection). Severity score: 17.53.
CWE-416 – using after free. Severity score: 15.50.
CWE-22 – improperly limiting pathnames to restricted directories (path traversal). Severity score: 14.08.
CWE-352 – cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Severity score: 11.53.
CWE-434 – unrestricted uploading of files with dangerous type. Severity score: 9.56.
CWE-476 – NULL pointer dereferencing. Severity score: 7.15.
CWE-502 – deserializing untrusted data. Severity score: 6.68.
CWE-190 – integer overflow or wraparound. Severity score: 6.53.
CWE-287 – improper authentication. Severity score: 6.35.
CWE-798 – using hard-coded credentials. Severity score: 5.66.
CWE-862 – missing authorization. Severity score: 5.53.
CWE-77 – improperly neutralizing special elements in commands (command injection). Severity score: 5.42.
CWE-306 – missing authentication for critical functions. Severity score: 5.15.
CWE-119 – improperly restricting operations in memory buffers. Severity score: 4.85.
CWE-276 – incorrect default permissions. Severity score: 4.84
CWE-918 – server-side request forgery (SSRF). Severity score: 4.27.
CWE-362 – concurrent execution with shared resources and improper synchronization (race condition). Severity score: 3.57.
CWE-400 – uncontrolled resource consumption. Severity score: 3.56.
CWE-611 – improperly restricting XML external entity references. Severity score: 3.38.
CWE-94 – improper control of code generation (code injection). Severity score: 3.32.

What changed between 2021 and 2022’s Top 25?

The following are the most notable differences between the 2021 and 2022 CWE Top 25 lists:

There are three new categories of weaknesses (CWE-362, CWE-400, and CWE-94)
Three types of weaknesses have been removed totally from the list (CWE-200, CWE-522, and CWE-732)
There have been a few significant reshuffles in the order of the sorts of weaknesses.

It is important to remember that the human aspect is the most prevalent type of vulnerability. Employees are responsible for ensuring that technological flaws, such as those found on the CWE Top 25 list, are handled acceptably.

How GuardRails Can Help

We safeguard organizations by identifying the CWE top vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle. We continuously scan all repositories to detect security errors in the code as soon as the developers introduce them, educating them on the spot on how to fix them so that none of them make it to production. You can try GuarRails for free easily integrating it with your version control system.