Exposure of Sensitive Information Due to Incompatible Policies
The product's intended functionality exposes information to certain actors in accordance with the developer's security policy, but this information is regarded as sensitive according to the intended security policies of other stakeholders such as the product's administrator, users, or others whose information is being processed.
Description
When handling information, the developer must consider whether the information is regarded as sensitive by different stakeholders, such as users or administrators. Each stakeholder effectively has its own intended security policy that the product is expected to uphold. When a developer does not treat that information as sensitive, this can introduce a vulnerability that violates the expectations of the product's users.
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 displays some information on a web page.
Social Security Number: <%= ssn %></br>Credit Card Number: <%= ccn %>The code displays a user's credit card and social security numbers, even though they aren't absolutely necessary.
See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to sensitive information exposure.
Weaknesses in this category are related to the A04 "Insecure Design" category in the OWASP Top Ten 2021.
This category identifies Software Fault Patterns (SFPs) within the Exposed Data cluster (SFP23).
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
This view outlines the SMM representation of the Automated Source Code Data Protection Measurement specifications, as identified by the Consortium for Information & So...
CWE entries in this view have maintenance notes. Maintenance notes are an indicator that an entry might change significantly in future versions. This view was created...
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