CWE-497 Detail

CWE-497

Exposure of Sensitive System Information to an Unauthorized Control Sphere
Incomplete
2006-07-19
00h00 +00:00
2023-10-26
00h00 +00:00
Notifications for a CWE
Stay informed of any changes for a specific CWE.
Notifications manage

Name: Exposure of Sensitive System Information to an Unauthorized Control Sphere

The product does not properly prevent sensitive system-level information from being accessed by unauthorized actors who do not have the same level of access to the underlying system as the product does.

CWE Description

Network-based products, such as web applications, often run on top of an operating system or similar environment. When the product communicates with outside parties, details about the underlying system are expected to remain hidden, such as path names for data files, other OS users, installed packages, the application environment, etc. This system information may be provided by the product itself, or buried within diagnostic or debugging messages. Debugging information helps an adversary learn about the system and form an attack plan.

An information exposure occurs when system data or debugging information leaves the program through an output stream or logging function that makes it accessible to unauthorized parties. Using other weaknesses, an attacker could cause errors to occur; the response to these errors can reveal detailed system information, along with other impacts. An attacker can use messages that reveal technologies, operating systems, and product versions to tune the attack against known vulnerabilities in these technologies. A product may use diagnostic methods that provide significant implementation details such as stack traces as part of its error handling mechanism.

General Informations

Modes Of Introduction

Implementation

Applicable Platforms

Language

Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined)

Common Consequences

Scope Impact Likelihood
ConfidentialityRead Application Data

Observed Examples

References Description

CVE-2021-32638

Code analysis product passes access tokens as a command-line parameter or through an environment variable, making them visible to other processes via the ps command.

Potential Mitigations

Phases : Architecture and Design // Implementation
Production applications should never use methods that generate internal details such as stack traces and error messages unless that information is directly committed to a log that is not viewable by the end user. All error message text should be HTML entity encoded before being written to the log file to protect against potential cross-site scripting attacks against the viewer of the logs

Detection Methods

Automated Static Analysis

Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Effectiveness : High

Vulnerability Mapping Notes

Justification : This CWE entry is at the Base level of abstraction, which is a preferred level of abstraction for mapping to the root causes of vulnerabilities.
Comment : Carefully read both the name and description to ensure that this mapping is an appropriate fit. Do not try to 'force' a mapping to a lower-level Base/Variant simply to comply with this preferred level of abstraction.

Related Attack Patterns

CAPEC-ID Attack Pattern Name
CAPEC-170 Web Application Fingerprinting
An attacker sends a series of probes to a web application in order to elicit version-dependent and type-dependent behavior that assists in identifying the target. An attacker could learn information such as software versions, error pages, and response headers, variations in implementations of the HTTP protocol, directory structures, and other similar information about the targeted service. This information can then be used by an attacker to formulate a targeted attack plan. While web application fingerprinting is not intended to be damaging (although certain activities, such as network scans, can sometimes cause disruptions to vulnerable applications inadvertently) it may often pave the way for more damaging attacks.
CAPEC-694 System Location Discovery

An adversary collects information about the target system in an attempt to identify the system's geographical location.

Information gathered could include keyboard layout, system language, and timezone. This information may benefit an adversary in confirming the desired target and/or tailoring further attacks.

References

REF-6

Seven Pernicious Kingdoms: A Taxonomy of Software Security Errors
Katrina Tsipenyuk, Brian Chess, Gary McGraw.
https://samate.nist.gov/SSATTM_Content/papers/Seven%20Pernicious%20Kingdoms%20-%20Taxonomy%20of%20Sw%20Security%20Errors%20-%20Tsipenyuk%20-%20Chess%20-%20McGraw.pdf

Submission

Name Organization Date Date release Version
7 Pernicious Kingdoms 2006-07-19 +00:00 2006-07-19 +00:00 Draft 3

Modifications

Name Organization Date Comment
Eric Dalci Cigital 2008-07-01 +00:00 updated Time_of_Introduction
CWE Content Team MITRE 2008-09-08 +00:00 updated Relationships, Other_Notes, Taxonomy_Mappings, Type
CWE Content Team MITRE 2009-03-10 +00:00 updated Demonstrative_Examples
CWE Content Team MITRE 2009-05-27 +00:00 updated Demonstrative_Examples
CWE Content Team MITRE 2009-07-27 +00:00 updated Demonstrative_Examples
CWE Content Team MITRE 2009-10-29 +00:00 updated Description, Other_Notes
CWE Content Team MITRE 2009-12-28 +00:00 updated Description, Name
CWE Content Team MITRE 2011-06-01 +00:00 updated Common_Consequences, Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings
CWE Content Team MITRE 2011-09-13 +00:00 updated Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings
CWE Content Team MITRE 2012-05-11 +00:00 updated Related_Attack_Patterns, Relationships
CWE Content Team MITRE 2012-10-30 +00:00 updated Potential_Mitigations
CWE Content Team MITRE 2014-07-30 +00:00 updated Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings
CWE Content Team MITRE 2017-05-03 +00:00 updated Related_Attack_Patterns
CWE Content Team MITRE 2017-11-08 +00:00 updated Applicable_Platforms, Taxonomy_Mappings
CWE Content Team MITRE 2019-01-03 +00:00 updated Taxonomy_Mappings
CWE Content Team MITRE 2019-06-20 +00:00 updated Related_Attack_Patterns
CWE Content Team MITRE 2020-02-24 +00:00 updated Description, Name, References, Relationships, Type
CWE Content Team MITRE 2021-03-15 +00:00 updated Demonstrative_Examples
CWE Content Team MITRE 2021-10-28 +00:00 updated Relationships
CWE Content Team MITRE 2022-10-13 +00:00 updated Related_Attack_Patterns
CWE Content Team MITRE 2023-01-31 +00:00 updated Description, Relationships
CWE Content Team MITRE 2023-04-27 +00:00 updated Detection_Factors, Relationships
CWE Content Team MITRE 2023-06-29 +00:00 updated Mapping_Notes
CWE Content Team MITRE 2023-10-26 +00:00 updated Observed_Examples