CWE-215: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into… | Glexia
CWE-215 (Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-215: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code
Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code 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-215 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-215, 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-215: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code
The product inserts sensitive information into debugging code, which could expose this information if the debugging code is not disabled in production.
When debugging, it may be necessary to report detailed information to the programmer. However, if the debugging code is not disabled when the product is operating in a production environment, then this sensitive information may be exposed to attackers.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following program changes its behavior based on a debug flag. The code writes sensitive debug information to the client browser if the "debugEnabled" flag is set to true .
Remediation
- Implementation: Do not leave debug statements that could be executed in the source code. Ensure that all debug information is eradicated before releasing the software.
- 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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.