Invocation of Process Using Visible Sensitive Information

Description

Many operating systems allow a user to list information about processes that are owned by other users. Other users could see information such as command line arguments or environment variable settings. When this data contains sensitive information such as credentials, it might allow other users to launch an attack against the product or related resources.

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

In the example below, the password for a keystore file is read from a system property.

String keystorePass = System.getProperty("javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword");
if (keystorePass == null) {
  System.err.println("ERROR: Keystore password not specified.");
  System.exit(-1);
}

...

If the property is defined on the command line when the program is invoked (using the -D... syntax), the password may be displayed in the OS process list.

See Also