CWE-1110: Incomplete Design Documentation

What is Incomplete Design Documentation?

• Overview: Incomplete Design Documentation refers to inadequate or missing documentation related to the product's design, making it difficult to understand the control flow, data flow, system initialization, and relationships between components. This can hinder maintenance, security analysis, and further development.

• Exploitation Methods:

• Attackers can exploit the lack of clear documentation to introduce malicious changes or understand weak points in the system.
• Common attack patterns include exploiting undocumented features or flaws in the system's architecture that are not well understood due to lack of documentation.

• Security Impact:

• Direct consequences include increased risk of introducing vulnerabilities during development or maintenance due to misunderstandings of the system's design.
• Potential cascading effects include increased difficulty in identifying, tracking, and fixing vulnerabilities, leading to potential security breaches.
• Business impact can involve increased costs for debugging and maintenance, delayed project timelines, and potential reputational damage.

• Prevention Guidelines:

• Specific code-level fixes involve ensuring that documentation is updated alongside code changes, including detailed comments in the code.
• Security best practices include maintaining comprehensive and clear design documentation, conducting regular reviews and updates, and ensuring all team members have access to and understand the documentation.
• Recommended tools and frameworks include using documentation generators and version control systems to track documentation changes alongside code changes.

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Technical Details

Likelihood of Exploit: Not specified

Affected Languages: Not specified

Affected Technologies: Not Technology-Specific, ICS/OT