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CWE-211Externally-Generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information

Category: data-exposure

Description

The product performs an operation that triggers an external diagnostic or error message that is not directly generated or controlled by the product, such as an error generated by the programming language interpreter that a software application uses. The error can contain sensitive system information.

Common consequences· 1

  • Confidentiality — Read Application Data

Potential mitigations· 5

  • [System Configuration]Configure the application's environment in a way that prevents errors from being generated. For example, in PHP, disable display_errors.
  • [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.
  • [Implementation]Handle exceptions internally and do not display errors containing potentially sensitive information to a user. Create default error pages if necessary.
  • [Implementation]The best way to prevent this weakness during implementation is to avoid any bugs that could trigger the external error message. This typically happens when the program encounters fatal errors, such as a divide-by-zero. You will not always be able to control the use of error pages, and you might not be using a language that handles exceptions.

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/211.html

Related by meaning· 6

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

CWE
Self-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
CWE
Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
CWE
Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code
CWE
Sensitive Information Uncleared Before Debug/Power State Transition
CWE
Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity
CWE
Exposure of Sensitive System Information to an Unauthorized Control Sphere
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.