Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Opis

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

- private, personal information, such as personal messages, financial data, health records, geographic location, or contact details

- system status and environment, such as the operating system and installed packages

- business secrets and intellectual property

- network status and configuration

- the product's own code or internal state

- metadata, e.g. logging of connections or message headers

- indirect information, such as a discrepancy between two internal operations that can be observed by an outsider

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

- the product's own users

- people or organizations whose information is created or used by the product, even if they are not direct product users

- the product's administrators, including the admins of the system(s) and/or networks on which the product operates

- the developer

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

- the code **explicitly inserts** sensitive information into resources or messages that are intentionally made accessible to unauthorized actors, but should not contain the information - i.e., the information should have been "scrubbed" or "sanitized"

- a different weakness or mistake **indirectly inserts** the sensitive information into resources, such as a web script error revealing the full system path of the program.

- the code manages resources that intentionally contain sensitive information, but the resources are **unintentionally made accessible** to unauthorized actors. In this case, the information exposure is resultant - i.e., a different weakness enabled the access to the information in the first place.

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an "information exposure," but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Inne nazwy

Information Disclosure

This term is frequently used in vulnerability advisories to describe a consequence or technical impact, for any vulnerability that has a loss of confidentiality. Often, CWE-200 can be misused to represent the loss of confidentiality, even when the mistake - i.e., the weakness - is not directly related to the mishandling of the information itself, such as an out-of-bounds read that accesses sensitive memory contents; here, the out-of-bounds read is the primary weakness, not the disclosure of the memory. In addition, this phrase is also used frequently in policies and legal documents, but it does not refer to any disclosure of security-relevant information.

Information Leak

This is a frequently used term, however the "leak" term has multiple uses within security. In some cases it deals with the accidental exposure of information from a different weakness, but in other cases (such as "memory leak"), this deals with improper tracking of resources, which can lead to exhaustion. As a result, CWE is actively avoiding usage of the "leak" term.

Skutki

• Confidentiality

  Read Application Data

Zapobieganie

• Architecture and Design · Separation of Privilege

  Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.

  Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

Przykłady podatności

• CVE-2022-31162 Rust library leaks Oauth client details in application debug logs
• CVE-2021-25476 Digital Rights Management (DRM) capability for mobile platform leaks pointer information, simplifying ASLR bypass
• CVE-2001-1483 Enumeration of valid usernames based on inconsistent responses
• CVE-2001-1528 Account number enumeration via inconsistent responses.
• CVE-2004-2150 User enumeration via discrepancies in error messages.
• CVE-2005-1205 Telnet protocol allows servers to obtain sensitive environment information from clients.
• CVE-2002-1725 Script calls phpinfo(), revealing system configuration to web user
• CVE-2002-0515 Product sets a different TTL when a port is being filtered than when it is not being filtered, which allows remote attackers to identify filtered ports by comparing TTLs.
• CVE-2004-0778 Version control system allows remote attackers to determine the existence of arbitrary files and directories via the -X command for an alternate history file, which causes different error messages to be returned.
• CVE-2000-1117 Virtual machine allows malicious web site operators to determine the existence of files on the client by measuring delays in the execution of the getSystemResource method.
• CVE-2003-0190 Product immediately sends an error message when a user does not exist, which allows remote attackers to determine valid usernames via a timing attack.
• CVE-2008-2049 POP3 server reveals a password in an error message after multiple APOP commands are sent. Might be resultant from another weakness.
• CVE-2007-5172 Program reveals password in error message if attacker can trigger certain database errors.
• CVE-2008-4638 Composite: application running with high privileges (CWE-250) allows user to specify a restricted file to process, which generates a parsing error that leaks the contents of the file (CWE-209).
• CVE-2007-1409 Direct request to library file in web application triggers pathname leak in error message.
• CVE-2005-0603 Malformed regexp syntax leads to information exposure in error message.
• CVE-2004-2268 Password exposed in debug information.
• CVE-2003-1078 FTP client with debug option enabled shows password to the screen.
• CVE-2022-0708 Collaboration platform does not clear team emails in a response, allowing leak of email addresses

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-668 Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere

Słabości podrzędne

• CWE-201 Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data
• CWE-203 Observable Discrepancy
• CWE-209 Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
• CWE-213 Exposure of Sensitive Information Due to Incompatible Policies
• CWE-215 Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code
• CWE-359 Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor
• CWE-497 Exposure of Sensitive System Information to an Unauthorized Control Sphere
• CWE-532 Insertion of Sensitive Information into Log File
• CWE-538 Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory
• CWE-1273 Device Unlock Credential Sharing
• CWE-1295 Debug Messages Revealing Unnecessary Information
• CWE-1431 Driving Intermediate Cryptographic State/Results to Hardware Module Outputs

Kiedy powstaje

• Architecture and Design
• Implementation

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific, Not Technology-Specific, Web Based, Mobile

Źródła

1. Mobile App Top 10 List — Chris Wysopal, 2010
2. Supplemental Details - 2022 CWE Top 25 — MITRE, Details of Problematic Mappings, 2022
3. State-of-the-Art Resources (SOAR) for Software Vulnerability Detection, Test, and Evaluation — Gregory Larsen, E. Kenneth Hong Fong, David A. Wheeler, Rama S. Moorthy, 2014