ASP.NET Misconfiguration: Creating Debug Binary

Description

ASP .NET applications can be configured to produce debug binaries. These binaries give detailed debugging messages and should not be used in production environments. Debug binaries are meant to be used in a development or testing environment and can pose a security risk if they are deployed to production.

Background

The debug attribute of the <compilation> tag defines whether compiled binaries should include debugging information. The use of debug binaries causes an application to provide as much information about itself as possible to the user.

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

The file web.config contains the debug mode setting. Setting debug to "true" will let the browser display debugging information.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <compilation
    defaultLanguage="c#"
    debug="true"
    />
    ...
  </system.web>
</configuration>

Change the debug mode to false when the application is deployed into production.

See Also