CWE

The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) is a community-created catalog of software and hardware weakness types intended to provide a standardized vocabulary for describing, discussing, and addressing software defects. It is designed to help stakeholders—developers, security testers, educators, and managers—understand root causes of vulnerabilities, improve secure coding practices, and coordinate remediation efforts across tools and processes.

CWE is maintained by MITRE with input from a broad community of contributors. The catalog organizes weaknesses by a hierarchical taxonomy and assigns each entry a unique CWE identifier (for example, CWE-79 for Cross-Site Scripting and CWE-119 for Buffer Overflow). Entries include formal definitions, potential consequences, typical mitigations, detection guidance, and relationships to other weaknesses. The structure supports linking weaknesses to related categories and to higher-level classes such as software design flaws or implementation errors.

In practice, CWE is used throughout the software development life cycle. It supports threat modeling, secure design reviews, static and dynamic analysis, and security testing. Many organizations map discovered issues to CWE IDs to communicate risk, align remediation priorities, and report findings. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and other vulnerability databases use CWE mappings to categorize root causes behind reported vulnerabilities and to track trends over time.

CWE complements other security resources such as CAPEC for attack patterns and CVE for individual vulnerabilities. The project is continually updated to reflect evolving technology and practices, and its content is freely accessible for education, assessment, and tool integration.