CWE contains over 900 weaknesses which range from abstract and conceptual to precise and technology specific. A precise weakness will have a “parent” weakness that is more abstract, which may also have “parent” weaknesses, and so on.
There are four types of weakness abstractions: Pillar, Class, Base, and Variant.
CWE Abstraction
These abstraction types correlate with the amount of specific information in the CWE. This specific information includes dimensions such as behavior, property, resource, coding language, and technology. A set of weaknesses can be grouped into a Category, which is simply a collection of similar weaknesses that share common characteristics, but not the same combination of the dimensions above.