CWEweakness
CWE-514 Covert Channel
- Abstraction
- Class
- Structure
- Simple
- Status
- Incomplete
- Languages
- Not Language-Specific
- CWE version
- 5.0
Description
A covert channel is a path that can be used to transfer information in a way not intended by the system's designers.
Common consequences
• Confidentiality, Access Control: Hide Activities, Read Application Data, Bypass Protection Mechanism — Typically the system has not given authorization for the transmission and has no knowledge of its occurrence.
Detection methods
• Architecture or Design Review: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful:
Cost effective for partial coverage:
• Inspection (IEEE 1028 standard) (can apply to requirements, design, source code, etc.)
Related
Attack pattern · CAPEC (1)
- CAPEC-463 Padding Oracle Crypto Attack attack pattern
Child of · CWE (1)
- CWE-1229 Creation of Emergent Resource weakness
Referenced by CAPEC · weakness (1)
- CAPEC-463 Padding Oracle Crypto Attack attack pattern
Referenced by CVE · weakness (2)
- CVE-2026-106582 In sshd and ssh in OpenSSH before 10.6, an LZ77 dictionary coder can be used even though this is contraindicated by the arXiv 2609.07709… vulnerability
- CVE-2026-42768 Issue summary: The CMS_decrypt and PKCS7_decrypt functions are vulnerable to Bleichenbacher-style attack when an attacker is able to… vulnerability
Referenced by CWE · can precede (1)
- CWE-205 Observable Behavioral Discrepancy weakness