CWE-209Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information

Description

Common consequences· 1

• Confidentiality — Read Application Data
  Often this will either reveal sensitive information which may be used to launch another, more focused attack or disclose private information stored in the server. For example, an attempt to exploit a path traversal weakness (CWE-22) might yield the full pathname of the installed application. In turn, this could be used to select the proper number of ".." sequences to navigate to the targeted file. An attack using SQL injection (CWE-89) might not initially succeed, but an error message could reveal the malformed query, which would expose query logic and possibly even passwords or other sensitive information used within the query.

Potential mitigations· 5

• [Implementation]
• [Implementation]Handle exceptions internally and do not display errors containing potentially sensitive information to a user.
• [Implementation]Use naming conventions and strong types to make it easier to spot when sensitive data is being used. When creating structures, objects, or other complex entities, separate the sensitive and non-sensitive data as much as possible.
• [Implementation, Build and Compilation]Debugging information should not make its way into a production release.
• [Implementation, Build and Compilation]Debugging information should not make its way into a production release.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 4

Exploits (incoming)4

Compliance frameworks addressing this (incoming)1

(incoming)8

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.