CWE-309 – Use of Password System for Primary Authentication | Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Overview

CWE-309 (Use of Password System for Primary Authentication) documents a weakness type used across vulnerability databases and security assessments. Use the sections below for definition, context, and mapped CVEs.

Security impact: Security impact: Depends on product and context; use CVE records, severity scores, and MITRE guidance to prioritize.

Description

The use of password systems as the primary means of authentication may be subject to several flaws or shortcomings, each reducing the effectiveness of the mechanism.

Background details

Extended context from the CWE catalog (rendered from MITRE XHTML).

Password systems are the simplest and most ubiquitous authentication mechanisms. However, they are subject to such well known attacks,and such frequent compromise that their use in the most simple implementation is not practical.

Applicable platforms

Kind	Name	Class	Prevalence	OS / CPE
language	—	Not Language-Specific	Undetermined	—

Related CVEs in this database

These CVEs are mapped to this weakness in this database and kept for traceability and search.

CVE	Published	Summary
CVE-2024-45675	2025-12-02	IBM Informix Dynamic Server 14.10 could allow a local user on the system to log into the Informix server as administrator without a password.

Previous names

Using Password Systems (2008-04-11)

Content submission

Name: CLASP
Date: 2006-07-19
Version: Draft 3

Content modifications

Date	Name	Version	Importance	Comment
2008-08-15	—	1.0	—	Suggested OWASP Top Ten 2004 mapping
2008-09-08	CWE Content Team	1.0	—	updated Background_Details, Common_Consequences, Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings
2010-12-13	CWE Content Team	1.11	—	updated Common_Consequences
2011-06-01	CWE Content Team	1.13	—	updated Common_Consequences
2012-05-11	CWE Content Team	2.2	—	updated Relationships
2012-10-30	CWE Content Team	2.3	—	updated Demonstrative_Examples
2014-07-30	CWE Content Team	2.8	—	updated Relationships
2017-11-08	CWE Content Team	3.0	—	updated Applicable_Platforms, Likelihood_of_Exploit
2020-02-24	CWE Content Team	4.0	—	updated References, Relationships
2020-08-20	CWE Content Team	4.2	—	updated Related_Attack_Patterns
2021-03-15	CWE Content Team	4.4	—	updated Demonstrative_Examples
2022-10-13	CWE Content Team	4.9	—	updated Relationships
2023-04-27	CWE Content Team	4.11	—	updated Relationships
2023-06-29	CWE Content Team	4.12	—	updated Mapping_Notes
2025-12-11	CWE Content Team	4.19	—	updated Relationships, Weakness_Ordinalities