CWE-210: Self-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
Official CWE-210 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-210: Self-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
Self-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information 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-210 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.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-210, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-210: Self-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
The product identifies an error condition and creates its own diagnostic or error messages that contain sensitive information.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code uses custom configuration files for each user in the application. It checks to see if the file exists on the system before attempting to open and use the file. If the configuration file does not exist, then an error is generated, and the application exits. If this code is running on a server, such as a web application, then the person making the request should not know what the full pathname of the configuration directory is. By submitting a username that is not associated with a configuration file, an attacker could get this pathname from the error message. It could then be used to exploit path traversal, symbolic link following, or other problems that may exist elsewhere in the application.
Remediation
- Implementation,Build and Compilation: Debugging information should not make its way into a production release.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.