Improper Removal of Sensitive Information Before Storage or Transfer
The product stores, transfers, or shares a resource that contains sensitive information, but it does not properly remove that information before the product makes the resource available to unauthorized actors.
Description
Resources that may contain sensitive data include documents, packets, messages, databases, etc. While this data may be useful to an individual user or small set of users who share the resource, it may need to be removed before the resource can be shared outside of the trusted group. The process of removal is sometimes called cleansing or scrubbing.
For example, a product for editing documents might not remove sensitive data such as reviewer comments or the local pathname where the document is stored. Or, a proxy might not remove an internal IP address from headers before making an outgoing request to an Internet site.
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
This code either generates a public HTML user information page or a JSON response containing the same user information.
// API flag, output JSON if set
$json = $_GET['json']
$username = $_GET['user']
if(!$json)
{
$record = getUserRecord($username);
foreach($record as $fieldName => $fieldValue)
{
if($fieldName == "email_address") {
// skip displaying user emails
continue;
}
else{
writeToHtmlPage($fieldName,$fieldValue);
}
}
}
else
{
$record = getUserRecord($username);
echo json_encode($record);
}The programmer is careful to not display the user's e-mail address when displaying the public HTML page. However, the e-mail address is not removed from the JSON response, exposing the user's e-mail address.
See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to resource lifecycle management.
Weaknesses in this category are related to the "Zone Boundary Failures" category from the SEI ETF "Categories of Security Vulnerabilities in ICS" as published in March...
Weaknesses in this category are related to the design and architecture of system resources. Frequently these deal with restricting the amount of resources that are acc...
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
This view contains a selection of weaknesses that represent the variety of weaknesses that are captured in CWE, at a level of abstraction that is likely to be useful t...
This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during implementation.
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