The guidance quoted says, “SHOULD NOT”. As defined in the doc, The terms “SHOULD” and “SHOULD NOT” indicate that among several possibilities one is recommended as particularly suitable, without mentioning or excluding others, or that a certain course of action is preferred but not necessarily required, or that (in the negative form) a certain possibility or course of action is discouraged but not prohibited.
So, it is perfectly valid for an organization to require these controls to be in place for their passwords, even if discouraged. If those are their control requirements, then these weaknesses describe the weakness in the system correctly for their control. These still have use & function – even if you want to add language to clarify that control deficiency is not encouraged since the underlying control is discouraged. -Larry Shields, CISSP Chief of Information Security Services Dept. Head R131 – MITRE InfoSec 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: RE: Time to retire CWE-262 and CWE-263 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 Password Aging with Long Expiration - (263) https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/263.html REFERENCES needs updating with: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html 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>
