CWE-201: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data | Glexia
CWE-201 (Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-201: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data
Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Files or Directories Read Memory Read Application Data: Sensitive data may be exposed to attackers.
Developer Pattern
CWE-201 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-201, 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-201: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data
The code transmits data to another actor, but a portion of the data includes sensitive information that should not be accessible to that actor.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following is an actual MySQL error statement: The error clearly exposes the database credentials.
Remediation
- Requirements: Specify which data in the software should be regarded as sensitive. Consider which types of users should have access to which types of data.
- Implementation: Ensure that any possibly sensitive data specified in the requirements is verified with designers to ensure that it is either a calculated risk or mitigated elsewhere. Any information that is not necessary to the functionality should be removed in order to lower both the overhead and the possibility of security sensitive data being sent.
- System Configuration: Setup default error messages so that unexpected errors do not disclose sensitive information.
- Architecture and Design: Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area. Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.
Detection
- 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.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
No related CWE relationships are published yet.
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.