Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information
The product creates a search index of private or sensitive documents, but it does not properly limit index access to actors who are authorized to see the original information.
Description
Web sites and other document repositories may apply an indexing routine against a group of private documents to facilitate search. If the index's results are available to parties who do not have access to the documents being indexed, then attackers could obtain portions of the documents by conducting targeted searches and reading the results. The risk is especially dangerous if search results include surrounding text that was not part of the search query. This issue can appear in search engines that are not configured (or implemented) to ignore critical files that should remain hidden; even without permissions to download these files directly, the remote user could read them.
See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to access control.
This category identifies Software Fault Patterns (SFPs) within the Exposed Data cluster (SFP23).
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during implementation.
This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during design.
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