CWE-200: Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

How it's found

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor describes a general pattern rather than a single fixed bug. Testers use a mix of static analysis and manual code review to find where a target's code matches this pattern, then confirm exploitability by hand.

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: 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: Information exposures can occur in different ways: 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.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 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 explicitly insertsthe codesensitive 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" indirectly insertsa different weakness or mistakethe sensitive information into resources, such as a web script error revealing the full system path of the program. unintentionally made accessiblethe code manages resources that intentionally contain sensitive information, but the resources areto 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.

Consequences

• Read Application Data

Mitigations

• Architecture and Design: 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.

How TurboPentest tests for this

TurboPentest's automated black-box pentest actively probes for Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor using Nuclei's exposure templates (exposed configuration files, admin panels, API keys, .env and .git paths), with no source code required. Connecting a GitHub repo adds white-box confirmation from IntegSec's Opengrep SAST rule pack, which carries 8 dedicated rules for this weakness.

Tools: Nuclei

• Exception Detail To Client
• Log Secret Value
• Error Detail To Client
• Exception Detail Exposure
• Error Stack In Response
• Express X Powered By Enabled
• Graphql Introspection Enabled
• Sensitive Data In URL Query

Frequently asked questions

Related CWEs

• Class weakness
  CWE-668: Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere
• Base weakness
  CWE-203: Observable Discrepancy
• Base weakness
  CWE-209: Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
• Base weakness
  CWE-215: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code