Protocol Vulnerability

Definitions

1. A weakness in a protocol's design or implementation that can be exploited to bypass trust, leak data, disrupt service, or manipulate communications. Protocol vulnerabilities may arise from poor authentication, parsing flaws, ambiguous state handling, or unsafe assumptions about the network.

   In plain English: A security weakness in how a communication protocol is designed or implemented.

   Example: "The product inherited a protocol vulnerability because it trusted sequence numbers that an on-path attacker could predict and replay."

Related Terms

• packet
• Communication Protocol
• Connection Manager
• Connection String
• Handshake
• Message Protocol
• Transport
• Advisory
• CVE Database
• IoT Vulnerability
• Media Access Control
• Packet Replay