CWE-359: Exposure of Private Personal Information to an… | Glexia
CWE-359 (Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-359: Privacy violation
Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Application Data
Developer Pattern
CWE-359 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-359, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-359: Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor
The product does not properly prevent a person's private, personal information from being accessed by actors who either (1) are not explicitly authorized to access the information or (2) do not have the implicit consent of the person about whom the information is collected.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code contains a logging statement that tracks the contents of records added to a database by storing them in a log file. Among other values that are stored, the getPassword() function returns the user-supplied plaintext password associated with the account. The code in the example above logs a plaintext password to the filesystem. Although many developers trust the filesystem as a safe storage location for data, it should not be trusted implicitly, particularly when privacy is a concern.
- This code uses location to determine the user's current US State location. First the application must declare that it requires the ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission in the application's manifest.xml:,During execution, a call to getLastLocation() will return a location based on the application's location permissions. In this case the application has permission for the most accurate location possible:,While the application needs this information, it does not need to use the ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission, as the ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION permission will be sufficient to identify which US state the user is in.
- In 2004, an employee at AOL sold approximately 92 million private customer e-mail addresses to a spammer marketing an offshore gambling web site [REF-338]. In response to such high-profile exploits, the collection and management of private data is becoming increasingly regulated.
Remediation
- Requirements:
- Architecture and Design:
- Implementation,Operation:
Detection
- Architecture or Design Review:
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
- Automated Static Analysis: Tools are available to analyze documents (such as PDF, Word, etc.) to look for private information such as names, addresses, etc.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.